A much needed sense of humour for all infertile couples !

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	• Inconceivable Ben Elton HarperCollins Audio, 1999 average customer review:based on 27 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Battle of the sexes?

This is a really good book. IMHO really good authors aren't only funny or only serious, but both because that's how real life is. Both Sam and Lucy are, in a way, caricatures - Lucy the former career girl panicked about her waning fertility, Sam the bewildered male who can't see what all the fuss is about - but they seem real and endearing through the "diary" format of the narrative.

Without giving away any real spoilers, I'll say that I love the character development in this book - how Sam comes to share Lucy's desire to have a child, how both characters come to be more sympathetic to each other through the process, and of course the ending that illustrates that real love and forgiveness are possible.

But good heavens, I really hope that if I ever want to have kids I'll prove fertile - this book really shows you all the hoops that reproductive technologies make couples jump through!

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another awesome brit

read everything you can get your hands on, he is hard to find in the states too. his writing is witty and deep at the same time. brilliant.

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A much needed sense of humour for all infertile couples !

Being infertile can be hell ! However, a sense of humour can help you cope better, and this book provides that. Even more importantly, it will help you communicate better with your spouse, because you'll be able to understand each other's perspective much better !

HYSTEROSALPINGOGRAMS AND ALL THAT

Ben Elton's style has been got under a bit of control since the heady early days of Stark. He still takes the occasional potshot at incidental targets, but he no longer fires a scattergun in every direction as he did then. As often, he picks a topic that might seem to call for the utmost delicacy and tact and treats it with the utmost frankness and even ribaldry. The topic in question is human infertility, although there is a very entertainingly-handled sub-plot of life within the BBC in addition. His style of comedy has always been to highlight the grotesque side of things, and so it remains here. This doesn't show any lack of human sympathy on his part - indeed very much the reverse I should say - but he is not for the shy or the oversensitive much less for the solemn or the pompous.

The processes of human sexuality verge on the absurd at the best of times whatever else can be said about them. When we factor in the exceptional manoeuvres increasingly demanded by a desperate mid-30's childless wife from her less committed husband, culminating in the lurid rituals of IVF, I think it's fair to say that it takes a certain type of writer to deal with such a theme successfully. Ben Elton handles it brilliantly. We are not spared the most graphic or intimate physical and anatomical details, but the comic style Elton adopts really masks a true delicacy of perception. Indeed I'm inclined to say that nobody with less of a sense of humour than the two protagonists show in this book would have been able to see the whole gruesome process through. The humour is very English humour, and I think I know what it's modelled on to a great extent. During the years of the Thatcher Terror, there used to be a hilarious column in the magazine Private Eye purporting to consist of letters from her husband to a friend named Bill. These were written in a very public-school idiom, probably derived basically from P G Wodehouse but influenced by minor literature such as the Molesworth books, familiar also from Oxford common-rooms and similar places of association, and updated more recently into the dialogue of the chattering classes in Islington and similar parts of London, the form in which we find it here. This idiom can take the heaviness out of the most serious situations without trivialising them, and whether or not I'm right about its precise origin in this book that is the way its author tries to use it, and tries very successfully in my own opinion.

The author never speaks to us directly throughout the whole book, using instead the device of diaries written by the husband and wife, much as is done in Julian Barnes's Talking it Over. The device works very well here. Ben Elton is an observer and critic with a particularly acute eye for human behaviour and attitudes, and it helps if he steps back a little from the narrative for that very reason. The incidents in the story are often Rabelaisian and hilarious, but the dilemmas and worse that the characters face are touched in with no little sympathy as well as perceptiveness. The style of writing has even gained a little (dare I say this?) refinement, to its and our general benefit I'd say. The ending is genuinely touching, so on balance 5 stars.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

The international bestseller that inspired the movie Maybe Baby.

Birds do it. Bees do it. Why can't Sam and Lucy?

When Lucy first suggested they make a baby, Sam was gung ho --after all, sleeping with his wife is one of Sam's favorite things to do. Then out came the thermometers, followed by the holistic home remedies -- not to mention some humiliating bouts with specimen jars. Soon Lucy's demands are driving Sam out of his mind. That is, until Sam conceives a plan of his own: He'll write a screenplay based on his and Lucy's poignant (and often uproarious) efforts to conceive a child. It could be a big hit. It might even make Sam's career. Or cost him his marriage . . .

From the award-winning author of Popcorn and Blast from the Past comes this hilarious and heartbreaking new novel --a provocative two-sided look at one couple's inconceivable dilemma. From sperm that swim backward to aromatherapy run amok, procreation for Lucy and Sam has turned into a grisly little war. But if Lucy feels barren as the Sahara, and Sam thinks his gay friends will be fathers before he is, they're about to have yet another problem on their hands: saving the love that once was everything they had. . . .

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