I was surprised that I had not come across any books by Clare Chambers before, given how much I ended up liking this book. The blurb at the back of the book said that its style was reminiscent of Ann Patchett and Kazuo Ishiguro – both of whom are authors I greatly admire – and while book blurbs are often exaggerated, this one wasn’t. Not only did I find myself completely engrossed in the story, I was also able to enjoy the actual telling of it, to savor the quality of the writing rather than racing through it to get to the end. This is despite the fact that it is a mystery – of sorts.

Small Pleasures is set in England in 1957, and it takes two real-life events and blends them together into a story that is so compelling that it is almost hard to believe. The main event was the search for a “virgin mother” that a popular British tabloid undertook in 1955, based on the recent discussion of a scientific concept called “parthenogenesis.” This is a form of asexual reproduction that occurs naturally in some plants and animals. Could it also be possible in humans? That was the idea behind the search, and in the fictional world of Small Pleasures, there is actually a woman who seems to have had a baby while she was still a virgin, with the baby being conceived at a time and place — bedridden in a hospital with severe rheumatoid arthritis — where she could not have had sex with a man.

Of course, for those of us who have seen the TV show, Jane the Virgin, we saw how Jane got pregnant by being accidentally artificially inseminated with a man’s sperm, but the book, Small Pleasures, is set in the 1950s, long before such a technology existed. And yet, there is Gretchen Tilbury, who claims that her daughter, Margaret — now ten years old – was born without the involvement of a man.

It is a claim that falls to Jean Swinney — who works at the newspaper that raised the question of whether parthenogenesis is possible in humans — to investigate. While the mystery of the “virgin birth” is, of course, very intriguing and keeps us riveted, the focus of the book is really on Jean and on her growing friendship and emotional attachment to Gretchen, Margaret, and Gretchen’s husband, Howard, whom Gretchen married after she found out that she was pregnant. Jean herself is close to forty, unmarried, and is a dutiful caretaker to her cantankerous widowed mother, so her life is far from joyful. This is why her deepening friendship with the Tilburys becomes a source of great personal happiness for her – making for the “small pleasures” of the book’s title. However, it also eventually brings her into conflict with her professional obligations of investigating Gretchen’s claim.

The second real-life event that the author skillfully weaves into the story is a horrendous rail accident — one of the worst in Britain’s history — that happened in the 1950s, in which two trains crashed in dense fog in south-east London, causing the deaths of 90 people and injuring many more. Although the train crash was briefly mentioned in the beginning of the book, we forget all about it as we get caught up in the lives of Jane, the Tilburys, and the mystery of the virgin birth. But then, suddenly, the tragedy befalls one of the key characters in the book, and it comes as a complete shock.

It is so devastating that, by then, we don’t even care any more about the mystery of the virgin birth that the book started with — even though it does get solved by the end.

Small Pleasures
Author: Clare Chambers
Publisher: ‎ Mariner Books
Publication Date: October 2021

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Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.