Stephanie Jones: Book Review - The Secret Life of Luke Livingstone by Charity Norman

How lucky we Kiwis are to have inherited Charity Norman, a Uganda-born former barrister, from our British cousins. Having moved to New Zealand in 2002 after realizing, her bio notes, “that her three children had barely met her”, Norman is now an established writer of fiction, and the smart and timely The Secret Life of Luke Livingstone is the fourth novel she has published in the past five years.

A simple question – what do you do when you discover your husband has been hiding a fundamental truth about himself? – drives the novel’s action, which envelops successful solicitor Luke, his wife of 30 years, Eilish, their grown children Kate and Simon, Luke’s mother Meg, and several more well-drawn characters who enter the picture to offer support and enlightenment as the primary figures go into emotional freefall.

Luke’s secret – revealed in the back-cover blurb – is that he is a woman in a man’s body, exhausted by the lifelong strain of concealment. As we meet him, travelling by train to the London flat he uses when away from the family home in Oxfordshire, he is thinking ahead to his imminent suicide, urged on by the “final, inescapable conclusion” that he has no other choice. Whether by death or confession, he is certain he will lose Eilish, and he has the notion that the former act will somehow mitigate her humiliation.

The notion of death as a viable, even noble, solution to such a ‘problem’ is probed delicately and thoughtfully by Norman later in the novel, as Luke begins to live publicly as Lucia, the female he has always considered himself to be.

First, though, there is the catalytic coming-out, after Luke is deterred from plan A and heads home to the country to confess all to Eilish, who is in the midst of planning a 30th anniversary celebration. Daughter Kate, regarded by her mother as a free spirit and feminist of the old school, is recently home from an archaeological dig and estranged from boyfriend Owen. In son Simon’s happy family unit with expectant wife Carmela and young son Nico, Norman offers a glimpse of Luke and Eilish as they once were, though even then a shadow fell across the scene – a child born between Simon and Kate died soon after birth.

In light of Luke’s revelation memories are excavated, brushed off and re-examined: Meg is distraught with guilt as she recalls her gleeful toddler son begging for a dress and tiara; Kate thinks back to a long-ago afternoon and a weeping father and realizes that his tears were for more than her lost sister. Eilish questions the entirety of her marriage, a state both she and Luke had regarded as permanent. Most poignant of all is his hope that she can live with him as a woman, for he is as in love with her as ever.

Throughout, Norman’s pitch and tone are impeccable. The writing has the smart snappiness of a screwball comedy, but no figure is an object of fun. Through Luke’s experience, Norman exposes the struggle and experience of a transgender community, and handles complex and widely misunderstood issues of gender identity with intelligence and compassion. Inventive, surprising and full of empathy, The Secret Life of Luke Livingstone is a fascinating story of a family in rapid evolution.