The Baby Auction by Peter Taylor-Gooby - Review

I am on a mission to catch up on my reviews and I read The Baby Auction by Peter Taylor-Gooby all the way back at the beginning of December so it's definitely about time that I get my thoughts about it on my blog.

The Baby Auction

Auctioning babies makes sense, at least that’s what Market World thinks. After all the baby goes to someone who can give them a good start in life, and the parents get a return for their pain and trouble. 
For Ed and Matt, the Baby Auction sums up everything that’s wrong with a society based on profit. Then one day Matt rescues a drowning child and they face the question: can love and compassion overcome the harsh laws of Market World?

My Review

I didn't know what to expect when I picked up The Baby Auction as the title is quite shocking. It definitely fits the tone and dystopian feel of the story though and it is even scarier than it sounds when you realise just how easily the world could head in the same direction. 

I think the world building is done extremely well and it was very easy to picture the Market World and the Broken Lands as they are depicted by the authority in power. The Market World is run under the One Law and this promotes Property, Equality, Dignity and Trade. It's very reminiscent of a modern day 1984 and has a lot of the same themes which I thoroughly enjoyed. 

The characters are all really fleshed out and represent both ends of the kaleidoscope as Matt and Ed are both from the lowest levels of society, while Dain and Anna are the up and coming and rich top level. I thought the relationship between Matt and Ed felt a little forced to me, but they got together under circumstances that you just can't imagine, so it's not my place to judge what people in that situation should feel.  Dain and Anna's relationship however I found incredibly sweet and I was routing for them so hard throughout the story. It did help that I completely and utterly fell in love with Dain! He slowly broke down my barriers as I got to know him and by the end I loved his character. 

The story itself is very strong and I loved the politics and revolutionary talk throughout, showing that if people can come together then they can succeed against all odds. 

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed The Baby Auction and I look forward to reading more by Peter Taylor-Gooby. 

I gave this book 4 stars. 

About The Author 

I was lucky enough to have Peter Taylor-Gooby on my Getting To Know... feature if you want to read more about him check here!

My novels deal with how people live their lives in a diverse globalised capitalist world. In 'Ardent Justice', Ade struggles against the corruption of the City of London, where high finance and street homelessness flourish cheek by jowl. In ‘The Baby Auction’ Ed and Matt struggle to lead a passionate, humane and generous life in a world dominated by the market.
In my day job I'm an academic. My research shows how market capitalism generates inequalities between haves and have-nots and promotes a corrosive individualism that stunts our capacity for empathy, charity and love.
I enjoy hill-walking, riding my bike, holidays and looking after my grand-daughter (not in that order). I became interested in social policy issues after working on adventure playgrounds, teaching, claiming benefits and working in a social security office in Newcastle. I’ve worked in the UK, most European countries, Canada, the US, China, Korea and Japan, Australia and South Africa.

Getting To Know... Peter Taylor-Gooby

Today on Getting To Know... I am welcoming Peter Taylor-Gooby. Peter is the author of The Baby Auction, a dystopian thriller (look out for a review soon). 

You have written many sociological papers and books and you are world renowned for your work on new social risks. What is it that draws you to this subject and drives your passion about it?

It’s curiosity and wanting to find out how the world works and how it’s changing. The core idea is that as families change, as people live much longer and as global competition and technological change transform our working lives, people face new risks: managing young children with both parents working full time; getting housing; care in old age; getting the training and re-training you need for a job. We don’t have the right policies and institutions to help with these and different countries tackle them in different ways. It is spreading knowledge about how these things work and contributing to it that drives me (and there’s always the magic moment if you’re very lucky, when you know something before everyone else in the world does).

Your book, The Baby Auction, is a dystopian novel and you have talked before about why you write dystopia, but what was the inspiration behind this story?

The starting point was really an intellectual problem: how you can have real trust and real love – all the things we values most – in a market society? Markets are about looking out for yourself. Buyer beware! is the watchword, and markets are increasingly taking over our world. But then the characters came to me and I rewrote and rewrote and the finished book is really the story of Matt and Ed and Dain and Anna.

Have you found writing a fiction novel a lot different than writing non-fiction?

Absolutely different! Writing fiction is so much about getting inside the character and seeing the world from their viewpoint and letting them develop. I find scenes with my characters in them come to me, with great clarity, and I desperately want to get them into the book, so I write them, and then the characters start doing things I didn’t expect and certainly didn’t plan and it all takes off.

Academic writing is all about devising a rigorous structure, typically developing a theory to generate a hypothesis you can test with the evidence available and everything narrows in on the conclusion. Imaginative fiction is the other way round. I write fiction to discover how things will end up, I write the academic work to make one miniscule contribution to an enormous structure of knowledge.

As well as your writing, you work as a Research Professor of Social Policy at a University, what kind of things does this role entail?

I run research projects and teach postgraduate students. The research we’re doing now is detailed work in Denmark, Germany, Norway, Slovenia and the UK on what people think the welfare state will be like in 25 years’ time (not finished yet, but the UK stands out because it’s so gloomy: most people here say we won’t be able to afford to have decent pensions or the NHS by them and you don’t get that in the other countries.)

Do you have a favourite character that you have written so far?

I think it’s Matt. He’s not really interested in all the big issues that are going on around him or having a career, he just knows that Ed is the best thing that’s ever happened to him and he does what’s right, whatever it costs. I admire him.

You have received an OBE, is there anything you can tell us about this experience?

Many impressions! How palatial Buckingham palace is and how many different kinds of flunkies and of equerries and guards and assistants and servants there are. Then the other people receiving honours, all the people who’d worked on the Olympics, NHS workers, scientists, business people and of course soldiers. A group of young lads, looking very nervous, whom everyone treated with great respect, and you realised they were there because they’d had all lost limbs in Afghanistan.

When you're not writing, what would we find you doing?

Either riding my bike round the country lanes of east Kent or looking after my lovely grand-daughter (best grand-daughter in the world, in fact just like any other 15 month old!)

If you could give younger authors you any advice about your writing journey, what would it be?

Everyone’s different (that’s why we have such a glorious range of literature) so do what you do, and keep on doing it – and do pay attention to the rhythm of your sentences. English is a musical language!

Do you have a favourite author?

James Joyce for his monumental achievement (though he wasn’t really a nice person); so many other wonderful writers, can I mention Margaret Atwood for the depth of her insight, especially The Robber Bride and Cat’s Eye, and Anthony Doerr. All the Light We Cannot See completely bowled me over.

What can we look forward to next from you?

Ardent Justice a romantic thriller set among homeless people and billionaires in the City of London. Love, violence and a bit of tax evasion (and, of course, corrupt police, a complaisant media, an uncaring bureaucracy and the underbelly of the London art industry.)

Thank you so much to Peter for joining me today and taking time out of his extremely busy schedule to answer all my questions

The Baby Auction

Auctioning babies makes sense, at least that’s what Market World thinks. After all the baby goes to someone who can give them a good start in life, and the parents get a return for their pain and trouble. 
For Ed and Matt, the Baby Auction sums up everything that’s wrong with a society based on profit. Then one day Matt rescues a drowning child and they face the question: can love and compassion overcome the harsh laws of Market World?

Guest Post - Peter Taylor-Gooby On Why He Writes Dystopian Novels

Today I hand over Life Of A Nerdish Mum to Peter Taylor-Gooby, author of The Baby Auction, while he explains the reasons why he writes dystopian novels. 

I write dystopian novels for three kinds of reasons:

First, that’s what comes to me. My novels start out from scenes that appear in my head, often two characters so vividly present that you can see what they’re feeling, what their relationship is, almost what they are going to say by the way they are standing. I write out the scene, first as a short story, but then the characters do and say things I don’t expect and the novel goes on from there. Of course the process involves a lot of planning and re planning. Sometimes, as in my current novel, the initial scene drops out. I can still see it there in my head, but I couldn’t work out how to make it part of these people’s world – maybe it’s part of a different novel. So the process feels very much like exploring a world that is already there, but it’s also building that world. I guess dystopia was what my mind constructed out of various bits and pieces already present.

Secondly, I’m a social scientist in my day job and have written a number of academic books and articles on society, how it works and how it might work. My current novel imagines a world, Market World, run entirely on market principles. Everyone is equal and there’s no discrimination, but no room for charity and compassion either, nothing but self-interest. Maybe that’s where our society is heading, it sometimes feels like it. My academic work (on privatisation in the NHS) shows that trust is very hard to build and very easy to destroy when people are motivated by self-interest rather than concern for others. This is a real problem in the move from a system that once supported services following the professional judgements by doctors, who were trusted, to an accountancy model of resource allocation.

I thought ‘What if someone trusted someone so much they’d take any risk, make any sacrifice to help that person in Market World?’ That’s what happens and the consequences for the market-based dystopia, and the conflicts and challenges for those who believe in the market play out. Can they change? But maybe markets are the most efficient way of allocating resources? But is that enough for a human life? My novel is really a novel about love versus the market – you can’t publish that in an academic journal, but it’s what I wanted to write.

Thirdly, I’ve always had a lingering doubt about social science – it’s too scientific. It can tell you all sorts of things from why London is the biggest financial centre in Europe to what life is really like for the bottom ten per cent and what would really make a difference to educational opportunities (definitely not grammar schools!) but remember that the economists didn’t predict the 2007-8 Great Recession and the sociologists never foresaw the outcome of the Brexit vote. Both these issues were issues of trust – trust in banks and trust in politicians. Social science is good at facts but not so good at feelings, and feelings, emotions, passions are the most important things in our lives.

I wanted to find a way of thinking about these issues. For me dystopian novels are a way of imagining, a way of doing thought experiments that include feelings: what would it feel like to live in a particular kind of world? How would it change how you think? What would your goals and aspirations be? Who would you envy, what would make you sad, how would you love, what passions would burn within you? If you followed market self-interest could you lie with a straight face to anyone, even your family? What would that be like? How would it all work?

So there are three reasons why I write dystopian novels: first I don’t, scenes come to me and I fill them out and that starts off the story; secondly I’m exploring society and how it works and might work as I do in my day job as a professor of social policy; and thirdly I’m trying to go beyond social science and find a way of filling the biggest gap I see in it – it’s inability to deal with the feelings that drive how we behave and live our lives.

My novel is The Baby Auction (The Conrad Press, Canterbury, Amazon, Google Books and all bookstores) I hope you enjoy reading it.

Thank you very much to Peter for sharing his reasons today, I'm looking forward to reading The Baby Auction very soon and I'm also looking forward to Peter joining me for a Getting To Know... feature in the near future.

To connect with Peter on twitter you can follow him @PeterT_G

To buy a copy of The Baby Auction click HERE