"The Names" by Florence Knapp

 The prologue shows Cora going to register the birth of her newborn son. What should she call him? Her husband insists on Gordon, his name and, by tradition, the name of first-born boys in their family. But Cora favours Julian and her young daughter Maia suggests Bear. This is a high-stakes decision because Cora's husband is a man who controls his family by physically beating his wife. The rest of the novel follows Bear, Julian and Gordon in their separate lives.

At first I thought that this took the theory of nominative determinism to extremes (I myself am called a name that is not on my original birth certificate and I don't believe it has had a significant effect on my life). But actually this is more about the butterfly effect, the theory that a small change has repercussions that cascade through time. So that the husband's different reactions to his son's name is what drives the story.

I loved the Prologue because of the wonderful descriptions of a storm and its aftermath:

• “Outside, gusts lever at the fir trees behind the house and burst down the side passage to hurl themselves at the gate. Inside, too, worries skitter and eddy.” (Prologue)
• “Cora feels a draft of cold air, as though it's attached itself to his clothing and followed him up the stairs.” (Prologue)
• “The sounds of the storm meter out the minutes of night unravelling into day.” (Prologue)
• “A few doors up, a man's shirt is caught on a privet hedge, pegs still pinched at its shoulders.” (Prologue)

Wow! I thought. If it continues like this, I'm going to love it.

But I was swiftly disillusioned. My main problem was with the antagonist, the husband. He was a monster, he was an ogre, he was a dragon, he was Mr Hyde (although professionally he was Dr Jekyll), he was the embodiment of evil. He was said to be a wonderful GP although this was hard to believe because he was painted so black in his domestic life. For me, he felt two dimensional. There was little explanation for his wickedness, other than the fact that his neurosurgeon father was disappointed in him for becoming a GP. There was negligible exploration of his character; he was always a symbol of the very real problem of domestic abuse. I wondered whether the author realised his fundamental implausibility which was why he was swiftly sidelined in two of the three ensuing narratives, becoming a menacing bogeyman. In short, I felt that this was an issue-driven novel rather than about a character.

I also had problems with the structure of the novel, a sort of bildungsroman triptych. It is divided into seven year sections and further divided into subsections, each bearing the name of the boy (Bear, Julian or Gordon) whose story we are following. These sections are further divided so that the story is told from the limited third person perspective of the principal characters, mostly Cora, Maia and the boy. The present tense is used. This means that the reader is required to follow three storylines in which many of the characters (not just the major characters but also some of the minor ones) reappear but with different trajectories. I sometimes struggled to remember, for example, who Maia was involved with in this particular story, and whether a particular incident belonged to the storyline of Bear, Julian or Gordon.

This division of the narrative into three also meant that the three different plots become more prominent, and the fact that we were following at least five major characters left the author little time to develop them as characters.

Nevertheless, I developed a degree of empathy for at least two of the sons and there were a couple of lump-in-the-throat moments. So the novel was a success in those terms. I just felt it could have been more.

Selected quotes:

• “Sometimes big men feel small inside.” (Prologue)
• “He remembers his father's hands on the steering wheel, big and firm, a smattering of hair on the backs of them.” (1994; Julian)
• “Mr Radley chats to Maia, but his eyes are drawn back to his wife as though she is a slice of chocolate cake and he is politely waiting for the moment when Maia leaves, and he will be free to tuck in.” (1994; Gordon)
• “Julian can almost hear the sadness in her footsteps as she retreats down the hall.” (2001; Julian)

I suspect this will be popular with those who like their novels to be about important issues and are less worried about character development.

February 2026;343 pages

Published by Phoenix Books in 2025.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

I suspect that one of the inspirations behind this book is the novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson