Who is Alex's Mum from Martyn Pig and what is their importance?

Alex's mum actually appears both infrequently and briefly in the narrative, but nonetheless plays a very important role in the action in the resolution. She is a former actress, once successful in a regular role on a television series, and has passed both her talents and her ambition onto her daughter. It is she, Martyn comes to believe, who posed as Dad in order to withdraw his Dad's sixty thousand dollar inheritance from the bank. How much of a role she played in other aspects of Alex's plans, or for that matter Alex's plans with Martyn, is unclear - did Mum, for example, know what the car was being used for, and was her playing dumb therefore a lying component of Alex's overall plan? The novel never makes that point entirely clear, but it is one worth considering.