Patres nostres

Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan

Jamie returns to Scotland with his grandfather, the legendary social reformer Hugh Bawn, now living out his last days on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise.  The young man is faced with the unquiet story of a country he thought he had left behind and now he listens to the voices of ghosts, and what they say about his own life.  It is a story of love and landscape, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old left.  It is a tale of dark hearts and modern houses - of three men in search of Utopia.  Jamie Bawn's journey home will leave him changed beyond words - beyond the words that darkened his childhood.

The story, set in post WWII Scotland, is also about the “coming of age” of Jamie, a young boy growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father and a weak, ineffectual mother. One day, after a brutal beating of his mother by his drunken father, thirteen year old Jamie realizes he can no longer tolerate his home environment and moves in with his father’s parents, who have provided the only source of stability throughout his young life.

Jamie remains with his grandparents until he finishes school and then moves to England to strike out on his own. He returns to Scotland ten years later for an extended visit when he learns that Hugh, his grandfather, is dying. As he and his grandfather reminisce about the past, Jamie thinks to himself: “Once upon a time it was Hugh that had shown me, a young, saddened boy, how to grow up, how to make use of the past, and live with change. And now I was here: I would try to show him.”
Ultimately, this is a story about forgiveness because, in going through this process with his beloved grandfather, Jamie comes to the realization that his parents too were victims of their own personal torments and did the best they could with what they had to work with at the time – which is all any of us can do.

Such is the quality of the writing, the verisimilitude of the narrative, that the novel reads like an autobiographical memoir.

This was O'Hagan's debut novel, shortlisted for the 1999 Booker prize.  He went on to write four more novels and all five have either been nominated for Awards, or received literary prizes, or both.  The fifth novel, The Illuminations, published in 2015, was longlisted for the Man Booker.

Scar Tissue

Scar Tissue by Michael Ignatieff

As part of my reading habits I have been working through the Booker/Man Booker shortlists since the beginning of their time.  I always have several novels waiting in the wings and my reading of these is interspersed with more current titles, and novels which are less demanding and of the more popular thriller variety  As it happens this novel was the first I spotted in my basket of 'wallflowers'. 

The subject matter turns out to be so relevant to my place at the moment.  With my own mother in her last days of the cruel disease which is Alzheimers, this and the way the fictional family in Ignatieff's novel deals with it forms the very relevant core of the novel. 

At the heart of Michael Ignatieff's riveting novel about a woman's descent into Alzheimer's are the tangled threads of a Midwestern family, frayed by time and tragedy yet still connected - as much by pride, embarrassed love, and sibling rivalry as by the painful ties of family loyalty. More than a tale of isolated tragedy, Scar Tissue explores the bonds of memory, their configuartion in self-identity, and their relationship to love, loyalty, and death. 

It is a son's account of his mother's voyage into a world of neurological disease and anyone, and there are so many of us, who has lived their parent through that journey will find much that resonates in this memoir.  I find it a particular point of interest that none of the main characters is given a name...   Wikipedia gives a plot summary as follows:

The book details one woman’s struggle with Alzheimer's (or dementia, it’s not clear) and how her family respond to it. In particular, it is one of her son’s voice the reader hears since he is narrating it. Another son isn’t involved so much as he is living in Boston practicing as a neuroscientist. So it is the narrator who bears most of the burden. And all the while, he is trying to work on his marriage and his career as a philosophy professor. His own family life is hardly acknowledged and tears in his marriage begin to show, towards his wife; there for moral support but can't come to terms with him not being a consistent, central figure at the moment.

While her illness begins with her repeating stories ad nauseam, things get much worse as she starts to be incapable of recognizing her own family. Thus the prime caretaker – the son – ends up separating from his wife and living in derelict conditions. Nonetheless, he remains positive about the nature of life and death, even once he has lost both his parents, concluding that he “know[s] that there is a life beyond this death, a time beyond this time. I know that at the very last moment…I will be face to face at last with a pure and heartless reality beyond anything a living soul can possibly imagine

Of a Sad and Troubled Upbringing

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson's memoir is a moving book of Winterson's childhood and adolescent awakening as she discovers that she is a lesbian. "Why be happy when you could be normal?" is the real-life question of her adopted mother, as Winterson is evicted, at 16, for taking up with a second girlfriend (the attempts to exorcise her sexuality after the first having been unsuccessful).

             

Jeanette's experience of home life under the aegis of Mrs Winterson was bleak.  She was beaten, she was often hungry, she was left all night on the doorstep by a mother whose religious excesses might even have been a secondary influence on the household, the first being her depression, which was pervasive and relentless. She was not well loved. Jeanette describes Mrs Winterson, who, in between her violent homilies and dishonest violence, had like any good tyrant various crucial absurdities – "she was one of the first women to have a heated corset. Unfortunately, when it overheated it beeped to warn the user. As the corset was by definition underneath her petticoat dress, apron and coat, there was little she could do to cool down except take off her coat and stand in the yard."  In the end the story of Jeanette's early years ends in escape.  

The writer then skips forward a quarter century, and she has just split up from her girlfriend, the theatre director Deborah Warner. She finds her adoption papers in her father's effects, when he is moving to an old people's home. She has a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide.  "In February 2008 I tried to end my life," she writes, describing an attempt at gassing herself in a sealed car before realising that her cat was trapped inside with her. "My friends never failed me and when I could talk I did talk to them. But often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place." She begins her journey to track down her biological mother. 

She describes the beginnings of her current relationship with the renowned psychoanalyst, Susie Orbach, with whom she thought a romance would not develop, "because Susie was heterosexual and I have given up missionary work with heterosexual women". Orbach is portrayed in tender, maternal terms as she accompanies her on the search for her biological mother. Indeed, one senses Orbach's influence in passages on abandonment and the loss of mother love.

The quest to find her mother, Ann, and their first meeting in working-class Manchester, leads to a painful acceptance of the fact that a pre-adoptive identity - and its sense of wholeness - can never be regained. In some ways, this meeting takes her back to Mrs W and the dual role that she occupied as a mother and a non-mother: "I notice that I hate Ann criticising Mrs Winterson. She was a monster but she was my monster".  In the book Winterson unpicks the damage her adoptive parents wrought  on her. The peace she makes with her adoptive family is perhaps more significant and evocative than the more complicated and double-edged peace that comes with tracking down her birth mother.

Commentary with excepts from The Guardian and The Independent Reviews.

Gradus Vitae

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

A little book like no other, this 'sort-of' memoir from Julian Barnes is the story of his own closely-observed grief at the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh.  When she died.......

"Nothing had prepared him: not his parents' deaths, nor all the thinking about death that went into his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, published just a few months before. And very little helped him cope.

Certain things that were said, or not said, only made it worse: the friends who suggest he get away while they look after his house and their dog has the run of the garden (this while his wife is not yet dead); the ones who pretend not to hear when he mentions her name; the ones who ask – convinced he is looking better – "Have you found someone?" The griefstruck rarely know what they want, he says, so these offences are lightly noted, not raged over. What do they matter, after all – what does anything matter – when the worst has already happened?

One by one, the classic consolations offered to the bereaved are considered and repudiated: that suffering makes you stronger; that things get easier after the first year, through repetition ("why should repetition mean less pain?"); that the two of you will be reunited in the next life (which no atheist can believe). He owns up to thoughts of suicide and explains the reason for resisting: he is his wife's chief rememberer, and if he kills himself he will be killing her too.

One grief throws no light upon another, he says, quoting EM Forster. But some aspects of grief are universal, or can be made so through the honesty and precision with which they are articulated. Denying himself woolly comforts, Barnes scorns the euphemisms of "passed" or "lost to cancer" (the linguistic equivalent of averting one's eyes). Even actions that others might find strange – his habit of talking to his wife, though she is dead – have their own irresistible logic: "the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn't mean that they do not exist."
Pat Kavanagh was my agent for 30 years; it is hard for me to be objective. But this is not a book written for people who knew her. Nor is it "Before She Left Me", a story of her life and last weeks. Candid about his own grief, Barnes remains protective of her privacy; though her photo is on the back cover, her name doesn't appear in the text. Distressed by how many memories of her have gone, as if she is slipping away a second time, he lists the things he does remember – the last book she read, the last wine she drank, the last clothes she bought. But he doesn't disclose what they were.
"Let me tell you something about her," he wrote of his wife in the half-chapter of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, while giving away very little. Levels of Life, similarly, is a book that levels with us only up to a point. Its resonance comes from all it doesn't say, as well as what it does; from the depth of love we infer from the desert of grief. Even this essay is only one panel of a triptych – a form arrived at to "give sorrow words" when it might have been a mere stubbed-toe cry.

Review from the Guardian by Blake Morrison, 10th April 2013.

A Political Memoir

Politics: Between the Extremes

Personally I find Nick Clegg a bit of a dish (shameful admission since he is the same age as my sons) so it was a particular treat to listen to him reading his political memoir, Politics: Between the Extremes, as an Audible production.

Here's the blurb:

Politics has changed. For decades Britain was divided between Left and Right but united in its belief in a two-party state. Now, with nationalism resurgent and mainstream parties in turmoil, stark new divisions define the country and the centre ground is deserted.

As Deputy Prime Minister of Britain’s first coalition government in over fifty years, Nick Clegg witnessed this change from the inside. Here he offers a frank account of his experiences – from his spectacular rise in the 2010 election to a brutal defeat in 2015, from his early years as an MEP in Brussels to the tumultuous fall-out of Britain’s EU referendum – and puts the case for a new politics based on reason and compromise.

He writes candidly about his mistakes, including the controversy around tuition fees, the tense stand-offs within government and the decision to enter coalition with the Conservatives in the first place. He also lifts the lid on the arcane worlds of Westminster and Brussels, the vested interests that suffocate reform, as well as the achievements his party made despite them. Part memoir, part road-map through these tumultuous times, he argues that navigating our future will rely more than ever on collaboration, reforming our political institutions and a renewed belief in the values of liberalism.

Whatever your political persuasion, if you wish to understand politics in Britain today you cannot afford to ignore this book.

Since the disastrous, in my opinion, result of the June 23rd referendum on the UK's place in the EU, I have been politically engaged in a way since never before.  I joined the Lib Dems and now find I belong to the Liberal Elite, a member of a demographic that is being maligned for this pigeonholing.  It is giving rise to humorous posts and comment on one of the 'Remainers' Facebook groups to which I belong:

"Inspired by the cornucopia of fragrance ads on television this Christmas, I am working on my new perfume called 'Liberal Elite'. People will say "What is that delightful aroma" and I will say....... "Shhhh. It's 'Liberal Elite'. A heady combination of books (without pictures), avocados, facts, tolerance and being right."

Lol :)