Stagg and His Mother

In this intriguing novel, British author Pownall ( The Gardener ) spotlights successful architect Malcolm Stagg and his septuagenarian mother, Joyce. Stagg, alone after three failed marriages, suggests that his mother, widowed in WW II, should come to live with him in his extraordinary house on the Norfolk coast. There Joyce, whose life has been austere and proscribed, embarks on an ambitious program of education in philosophy, politics, religion and poetry, all of which she discusses with Malcolm. As her efforts alter the uneasy relationship between mother and son, the eccentric, dictatorial Joyce insists on accompanying Malcolm on his business trips. They travel to the war cemetery in North Africa where her husband (and Malcolm's father) is buried, and later to Estonia and Lapland. Their ventures into the contemporary world are as comic as their explorations of their shared past are distressing. Pownall portrays Stagg and his mother with intelligence and wit and without sentimentality. (July)