MEMOIRS
I
n his award-winning play The Father
(2014), Florian Zeller articulates the
bewilderment of senility through the eyes
of paterfamilias Andre as a procession of
familiar strangers, who change name, personality and backstory over a series of short
scenes. “I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves”,
he cries to a nurse at the end. A similar sense of
fragmentation pervades two recent books on
the agony, role changes and strange poeticism
of losing a father to dementia.
Keggie Carew’s first book, Dadland, is itself
now award-winning, receiving this month’s
Costa biography prize. It is part biography of
her charismatic father Tom, part military history and part personal memoir. She wants to
make sense of her father’s gravitational pull, but
also to “rebuild him . . . rebuild me”. It’s an exorcism, ghost-hunt, and swim through the archipelago of her father’s shattered self. In addition
to the author’s first-person account, her attempt
to “alchemise the past” consists of various texts:
letters, her grandfather’s minimalist diary,
taped interviews, her father’s notes-to-self (“I
have no memory of writing this”) and photos.
The shuttle between multiple timeframes
and voices suits a character as vivid and layered as Tom Carew: a master of deception (in
the preface, the author catches him signing a
cheque with a different name), a fearless
charmer more at ease in war than in peacetime,
impervious to pain, and an inscrutable expert
at poker and chess. Patricia Highsmith, whom
he befriended in Trieste, may well have drawn
on him for her Tom Ripley.
In his prime, Tom Carew was an eccentric
war hero. He started in France with the Jedburghs, an international crack team of soldierdiplomats parachuted in to raise guerrilla
resistance in France, then moved on to Asia,
where his courage and empathy with the locals
on their own terms earned him the nickname
Alchemizing the past
On remembering dead fathers
ED CRIPPS
Keggie Carew
DADLAND
415pp. Penguin. £16.99.
978 1 784 74076 4
Arno Geiger
THE OLD KING IN HIS EXILE
183pp. And Other Stories. Paperback, £9.99.
978 1 908276 88 9
Lawrence of Burma. As depicted here, the Jeds’
training at Milton Hall, the stately home from
which Margaret Thatcher heard Argentina had
invaded the Falklands and an early inspiration
for Rebecca’s Manderley, involved a Band of
Brothers mixture of high-jinx (from cooking
hedgehogs to booby-trapping loos) and jolts
of horror (lessons in silent killing from an
ex-Shanghai policeman, or reports of the SS’s
ultra-violent punishments for their enemies).
Carew’s post-war frustrations are vividly
evoked: restlessness in Trieste, endless money
worries, fruitless job hunts and three fraught
marriages. Dadland teems with complex
women, particularly Keggie’s violently unbalanced mother and her gatekeeper-stepmother
(“after the raging heat of Mum, Dad was drawn
to ice”). The passages about the stepmother are
sad, angry, largely understandable but sometimes reduced to petty details, such as Keggie’s irritation at being stuck in the “horrible
Claire Skinner (Anne) and Kenneth
Cranham (Andre) in The Father, 2015
spare room” with the “frilly lace bedspread”.
The book is strongest on the disease’s linguistic, often tragicomic consequences. It opens, as
Zeller’s play ends, with an arboreal metaphor –
one from The English Patient: “‘Birds prefer
trees with dead branches’, said Caravaggio.
‘They have complete vistas from where they
perch. They can take off in any direction’”.
Even the military passages are steeped in
poetry: the first verse of a Verlaine poem is a
radio call to the maquisards, and the author’s
descriptions have an easy lyricism.
The Austrian novelist Arno Geiger’s book
The Old King in His Exile, which has sold more
than a million copies worldwide and is under
half the length of Dadland, also balances the
TLS JANUARY 13 2017
33
poetic, the military and the idea of performance. Geiger’s father August is less flamboyant than Tom Carew, but no less poignantly
rendered. Conscripted in 1944 as a seventeenyear-old from a farming family, he caught dysentery in a Bratislava POW camp, was made to
bury the dead and took a photo of his six-stone
self that he kept as a memento for most of his
life. On his return to Austria, he never wanted
to leave home again.
There is a lathe-like precision to Geiger’s
writing. Succinct omens seed a mood of foreboding (the spooky voice of a kidnapper that
the police make public in the hope of identifying him; August’s eerie offer of a biscuit to a
television newsreader; his conviction that his
real address has been nailed onto a new, fake
house). As dementia sets in, mischief and
invention enrich his words “like the beauty
you see when an overgrown garden has been
thinned out a little”. August suggests “there’s
still a little performance in me”, though the
old people’s home becomes a refuge from any
need to perform.
Geiger explores his father’s waning sense of
home through Proust (“the true paradises are
those we have lost”), Hardy (“approaching
death is like a hyperbolic curve”) and Derrida
(“writing is always asking for forgiveness”).
Parents seem strong and able to stand up to life’s
unpleasant surprises, so children are harder on
their confusion. In the final pages, the book
slows to a sequence of maxims, deliberate and
dignified, while his father is still alive. Scarcely
any man, Geiger concludes, manages to live up
to the image that his children have of him.
The Old King in His Exile is all straight lines
and pared exactitudes; Dadlands in contrast is
an abstract-expressionist sprawl, an artful mass
of messy pathos. The psychological insights in
The Old King in His Exile are more consistently
acute, but only Dadland made me cry.