Family Romance: A Memoir
by John Lanchester
Faber ₤16.99. 256 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤13.59
How well do we know our parents? Reasonably well, most of us might assume. After all, it is often our relationships with them that define - for good or bad - how we turn out in life. So what happens upon discovering that the stories we knew (or thought we knew) about them are based on falsehoods?
Novelist John Lanchester was faced with puzzling inconsistencies when his mother, Julie, died. There was some uncertainty about her date of birth. She appeared to have lived under another name. Had she kept other secrets? Unsure of what to engrave on her tombstone, the author of The Debt to Pleasure decided to do some research. ”We should all know our family’s story, all the more so if nobody tells it to us directly and we have to find it out for ourselves.”
Family Romance is a son’s moving tribute to the two individuals who loved him most. This love was not uncomplicated - family ties never are. It was made knottier by Julie’s efforts to keep her past sealed off from her son’s curiosity.
One of Lanchester’s first discoveries concerns his mother’s peasant roots in County Mayo, Ireland. Julia, as she was originally christened, was the eldest daughter in an impecunious family, growing up during Ireland’s post-independence ”hungry thirties”. Led more by necessity than any sense of vocation, she joined the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, the nuns who ran the infamous Magdalene asylums. Her family’s pride was as immense as their disappointment when she realised that convent life was not for her.
Ostracism followed. ”The high point of her parents’ love and attention turned to the low point. At some level this was the defining emotional event of Julia’s life.” Ireland at the time, Lanchester claims, was ”in some respects all too like Afghanistan under the Taliban”. Shunned by her family, she found work as a nurse, and found a man she loved. But when he died, she joined a convent again and was a nun for the next 14 years. She kept this part of her life secret - even from the man she would eventually marry.
Bill Lanchester, the author’s father, had his own emotional baggage. He was born in Cape Town, grew up in Australia and Hong Kong, and was evacuated to England before the Japanese takeover. His parents stayed behind and spent years in an internment camp. The gulf that emerged between him and them during that forced separation became the central feature of his sentimental education.
Because his own father had been overly preoccupied with money, Bill spent most of his working life in a dull job that offered security. Because this happened to be with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, it meant the Lanchesters led an itinerant existence. John was born in Hamburg, but spent his childhood being carted around Asia - Hong Kong, Rangoon, Calcutta and Labuan.
Lanchester remains coy about his parents’ courtship, but quotes fragments from their letters that are poignant for what they leave out. Silences and omissions shape his upbringing. ”One of the things I have noticed about my novels,” he writes, ”is that they all concern people who can’t quite bring themselves to tell the truth about their own lives…I’ve come to realise that this interest in damaged, untellable stories comes from my parents.”
He is candid about the difficulties involved in writing an accurate account of his parents’ lives. There are points when he wishes he was composing a novel instead of a memoir. When his parents’ story turns into his story, Lanchester finds people’s motives (including his own) are considerably more difficult to fathom. The further ahead the narrative moves, the more his feelings weigh in.
Investigated at such close quarters, any life is interesting. When hidden behind a veil of half-truths, it is tantalising. When examined with as much love as Lanchester has clearly put into his Family Romance, such extraordinary lives become unforgettable.