Tom Lamont is a freelance long-form features writer with the Guardian and the Observer who lives with his wife and their two young children in north London. Going Home is his literary debut novel. I’m not tripping over male-penned fiction whose narratives explore fatherhood with sustained emotional depth; hence it’s no surprise to discover that Lamont hails as influences seasoned classic female authors such as Marilynne Robinson and Penelope Fitzgerald.
Going Home grabs us straight out the gate with punchily rendered banter between the main character, 30-year-old Téo, and his male pals from his schooldays. Dialogue is a forte of Lamont’s, brilliantly dramatising the tensions between the novel’s personalities, who “had verbal contractions, specific to this suburb, that were rarely heard anywhere else ... a muddled Londonese that was everything: part Irish, Asian, African, Mediterranean, Jewish, Eastern European”.
Téo leaves the financial district of London where he now lives for his hometown of Enfield, to begrudgingly visit Vic, his guilt-tripping widower father, who is in the “slow decline” of Parkinson’s. While Téo is back, a shocking event lands him as the full-time carer of toddler Joel, son of Lia, the only female member of Téo’s schoolfriend group. Téo’s been infatuated with Lia for years. Now he’s jolted overnight into parental responsibility for her son – and back into rivalry with his childhood friend, Ben.
The novel immediately captured me, but it also quickly irked me. There are plot holes you could drive a red double-decker bus through. But I’m glad I persevered – because once I decided to suspend my disbelief, a beautiful and compelling story of the bonds and the friction between fathers, sons and male friends unfolded. I couldn’t wait to see what happened next.
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Lamont is a fine writer, whose ear for the music of speech captures superbly the idiosyncratic logic of toddler speak. Going Home has been plugged as a comedy. I didn’t laugh, but instead I cried – at the resilience of children, the fleeting nature of their early years; and at the book’s compassion towards human fallibility: its hope that, in the face of challenge, people can grow, can learn to love.
