Surrogate complications

Press, 27 June 1987, Page 23

Surrogate complications

To Have and to Hold. By Deborah Moggach. Penguin, 1987. 320 pp. $10.99 (paperback). Surrogate motherhood is a topical, controversial subject and in this treatment it is complicated by a fecund sister offering to have a child for her sterile sibling. The problem then is how to be fertilised by her sister’s husband and this is solved by utilising the old-fashioned method, as

artificial insemination clinics do not want any involvement in such a messy family business. The author obviously has not caught up on the 1980 s concept of vacuum flasks that can

keep sperm alive sufficiently long for the recipient to be impregnated without a man even fleetingly in sight. Then the complications begin. The impregnation brings out the lustful thoughts of the donor brother-in-law and the tart side of his temporary, partner. Everybody goes out and becomes a swinger for a while with other couplings until the family units are reconstituted once more.

Smoothly written and lifted a little by its unusual twist, this is still a traditional novel of confused love and marriage in the middle class of London’s Kensington.

It has now been made into a television “memorable drama,” according to the publishers, which promises to be the type of sitcom a producer has wanted to pick for an up-to-date theme for variation from the usual. The actors can then bat each other’s feelings about, and the viewer can be passively' involved and able to tell himself he has watched, or read about as in the book, a major, important syndrome of our time of the infertile, unsatisfied housewife.—Ralf Unger.