Father and I Book

In an increasingly crowded marketplace, novelist Carlo Gebler's account of his relationship with his puritanical, damaged father stands out as a minor masterpiece. Ernest Gebler, in thrall to Stalin, wrote the hugely successful The Plymouth Adventure, based on the Pilgrim Fathers, which was made into a Hollywood picture. He continued to write, but his second wife (and Carlo's mother), Edna O'Brien, soon achieved a success that eclipsed his own. After he took to claiming the authorship of her first two books, she left him. And Carlo, along with brother Sasha, cruelly bore the brunt for her "degenerate genes". That Carlo Gebler's family was a mess of secrets, miscommunications and bitterness only makes them a typical family. However, his fashioning of the family history is poetic, disturbing, yet ultimately redemptive, through the death of Ernest in 1998 (on the same day Carlo had a son), the re-appearance of a half-brother by his father's earlier marriage (whose resurrective appearance Ernest had always threatened), and a posthumous root through his father's papers. He learnt that his father, who "released his true feelings like drops from an eye dropper", was clinically depressive, and had been treated callously by his own father. This knowledge helps Carlo in his unremitting desire to understand, having already broken the chain of abuse through his own family. Two lines from the prologue also frame the account as its final lines: "You can't change the past but, with understanding, you can sometimes draw the poison out of it." At times remarkably reminiscent of Martin Amis' Experience in its discussion of a dominant, obstreperous writer-father with a streak of bitter misogyny, it also moves with the unsentimental stealth of Blake Morrison's And When Did you Last See Your Father?, particularly when dealing with Ernest's final, harrowing days. It is a book of Ireland, of suburban London, but also the shifting sands of a child's perspective, still shuffling in its footholds. A poignant chronicle of conditional love, specific yet of universal hue and recounted with a stark, grimly brilliant candour, it is for men with difficulties with their own fathers, and those that share their lives, and their burden. --David VincentRead More