Family Romance by John Lanchester

Author:John Lanchester [John Lanchester]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571288335
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

‘Just to clarify my views …’ I can see here the thing my father perceived as control-freakery and bullying. This was the aspect of Jack that later made Bill unable to speak about money: his own father had used it as a means of control, so the feelings that money touched on were too painful to be raised. A nastier or more direct man than my father, or at any rate a different one, might well have replied: At the age of fifty-nine you’re living on your own in a YMCA, thousands of miles away from your wife and son, and you’re giving me life advice?

But this is not the letter of a bad man or an ill-wishing one. Although Jack is obviously keen to see himself as a wise man and someone who has done his fair share of living, the breadth of perspective is none the less impressive. To have survived parental alcoholism and a father’s descent into destitution and early death, to have qualified as a teacher, emigrated, gone to the imperial capital to qualify in a different trade, re-emigrated, married and set up in yet another country, had a child, gone to America to re-retrain, gone to yet another country and set up yet again, made some money, seen a war coming and gone into government service, spent a few years in a Japanese prison camp, gone ‘home’ to recover and then gone back out to take up your old job at age fifty-nine – well, you would feel you were entitled to a few opinions of your own. It was clearly very important to Jack to feel that he had lived his own life and made his own mistakes. But he was reluctant to let Bill do the same. Every parent can identify with that: even though we know in our hearts that we don’t always protect our children by trying to protect them, the impulse is almost impossible to check.

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