Deborah Levy (2016) Hot Milk

Sophie Papastargiadis, aged 25, and her mother, Rose, aged 64, are in Almeria, Southern Spain. A desert where immigrants work long hours in greenhouses at well over one-hundred degree Celsius heat and in humid conditions to produce tomatoes for stores in Europe. They are not tourist. They have rented a small beach-front property. Rose has re-mortgaged her London house to attend the Gomez clinic in the hope of a cure that has left her unable to walk. Sophie is her legs.

Sophie is the narrator. She has given up studying for an Phd in Anthropology to become her mother’s carer. She is making a study of her mother’s illness     

‘History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver.’

Rose’s medical history is the art of clinging to belief and disbelief. Like Carl Sagan’s baloney test about the ‘fire breathing dragon in my garage’, her symptoms are tested by Dr Gomez, but for every physical test, Rose offers an alternative view of why it hasn’t worked. She clings to her illness. Her daughter’s part of the fallout.

A Greek tragedy, like her marriage was, but with hints of matricide and rebellion.  

Dr Gomez seems like a charlatan. A purveyor of false beliefs and miracle cures. Yet, he warns Sophie not to begin limping after her mother. He tells her mother’s symptoms are ‘spectral, like a ghost, they come and go. There are no physiological symptoms’.

Rose depends on Sophie. Sophie has become dependent on her mother. An unvirtuous circle in the hellish heat of the Spanish sun in which something has got to give. Read on.

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Married to a Paedophile, Channel 4.

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/married-to-a-paedophile

Married to a Paedophile was, ironically, on at the same time as another outstanding piece of drama, Mother’s Day. The latter is conventional drama in that we start with tragedy and end in triumph – The Good Friday Agreement. The argument is implicit, cause and effect. Married to a Paedophile is more of a Greek tragedy in which, for example, solving a riddle Oedipus on the way to Thebes murders his father and sleeps with his mother.  There can be no triumphant note, even when the villain is punished, but there can be a better understanding.

One hundred people a day in Britain get that knock on the door, a police raid, computers and phones taken away. Downloading indecent images of children is one of the fastest growing crimes and it seems to be, as shown here, it is the middle-class men that are most often caught in the net.

The number prosecuted in no way reflects the actual numbers of paedophiles in our society. One German study (if I remember correctly and usually I don’t) indicated that one in ten men had paedophilic propensities.  The number in Japan… who knows? Manga pictures and child sex dolls sold as part of normal society. What we do know is the more dedicated resources our police were given to investigate crimes like this the more arrests they would make and our vastly overcrowded and chaotic prison system would be unable to cope. We hide from that truth.

Married to a Paedophile claims to be hybrid of fact and fiction in that actors ‘lip-sync’ people who get that knock on the door. A mockumentary or docudrama.

Plotting is as straight forward as in the drama Mother’s Day. We have the characterisation of a good paedophile, a senior school teacher, who is given the name Alex, who has two children, one at university and the other about to go to university. His wife Kate goes through the emotions of disbelief to acceptance that she never knew the man she had married and she shuns him. His children do not.

Alex’s daughters buy into the argument their father offers them that he was depressed and would never hurt them, what he did was wrong, but it was a kind of illness. To my ears it sound very like the arguments used by alcoholics. And I’ve heard it many times. Kate disagrees with her daughter about this. Alex had a choice, she argues. He wasn’t ill, he is a paedophile and she wants nothing to do with him or his ‘illnesses’.

Mad? Bad? Or Sad?

The characterisation of the bad paedophile is Robert. Other people do his talking for him. Unlike Alex he never addresses the camera. He never explains. His wife Helen explains for him.  They have been married for 40 years and she is shown getting ready to go and meet him, making herself nice for him, when he’s realised from prison. She wants to protect him. But he can no longer live in the family home because of their grandchildren. His son’s wife in particular is antagonistic. She had breastfed her grandchildren in front of Robert and one of the images he collected, but claimed not to look at, was of a child being breastfed, taken from its mother and…well, you get the picture. You want to grind glass into Robert’s eyes. But here it is Helen you feel angry at, and in the end, feeling sorry for. Good drama does that.

And the dramatization of the good and bad paedophile does that, moves you. Well, worth watching, but let’s not buy into it being a documentary or there being any real policing of the net.