SOURCE: “The Battle of All Mothers,” in Spectator, May 11, 1991, p. 38.

In the following review, Brookner offers a negative assessment of The Battle for Christabel.

The tone of Margaret Forster's last novel, Have the Men Had Enough?, was justifiably angry, since the wrong which she so ardently desired to have righted was, alas, irreversible: Alzheimer's disease may come to any of us, and there is little we can do about it. In the present novel The Battle for Christabel the tone is even angrier, yet the cause may seem slender and even unjustifiable. In any event it begins on an intemperate note and never wavers, which is regrettable, for here is a situation in which balance and satire are called for, never more so than because much of the anger is directed against social workers. This will give the novel additional topicality—indeed, everything in it is topical—yet...