NOTES ON NOBODY’S CHILDREN
WARNING: This page contains substantial SPOILERS for Nobody’s Children.
NOTES ON ISAAC
In a range of books notable for introducing complex, believable recurring characters, Admiral Isaac Douglas Summerfield remains one of my favourites. Although he first appeared in Kate’s novel Return of the Living Dad, references to him had been a consistent feature of the New Adventures range since his daughter, the supposedly orphaned Benny, was first introduced.
Isaac as he appears in Return of the Living Dad is a complex man – quiet and intense, loving yet undemonstrative, with a penchant for ruthlessness and a finely-honed sense of irony. Benny’s long-absent father could so easily have been written as a generic father, a generic soldier or both, but in Kate’s loving hands he became a rounded, richly sympathetic human being.
Nobody’s Children is only the third release to feature Isaac at any length, although he makes rather momentary appearances in The Glass Prison and Life During Wartime. Of his actual appearances I prefer Return of the Living Dad to the audio drama Death and the Daleks, where Isaac as played by Ian Collier seems rather too stagey, considerably less nuanced than the book version. In ‘Nursery Politics’ I was writing for the original.
Isaac’s chapter was always central to ‘Nursery Politics’, and to the ways in which I wanted to treat the theme of family. (For this reason I’m very glad that Kate sportingly allowed me, with no fuss whatsoever, to become one of the very select group of authors to write for him.) His home – a quiet English village of the 1980s – acts as a pastoral haven for Benny from the space-operatic political hubbub of the Collection, and allows her some important space for reflection.
His presence throws the generational themes into reverse, allowing us to stop seeing Benny as a mother as she turns to her own father for protection. It also offers an alternative perspective on the question of how far it’s acceptable to go for one’s children. Finally, it reminds Bernice, as she struggles to contend with the incompatible perspectives of Draconian and Mim culture, of her own background and the cultural assumptions she may have unknowingly inherited.
As far as I can recall, this is the first time we’re told that Isaac keeps a journal. It seemed right, somehow.
- Notes on Nobody’s Children.
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- Forward to Notes on Peter.
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