FAMILY ROMANCE: A MEMOIR
By John Lanchester,
Faber, £7.75

This book begins with a ringing denial of one of the most famous opening lines of literature. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina starts with the declaration: “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy families is unhappy in its own way.” John Lanchester says that the line is so magnificent and sonorous that readers do not notice that it is untrue. It is untrue at two different levels. First, happy families aren’t particularly alike, any more than unhappy ones are unalike. At another level, the statement assumes that families are either happy or unhappy. This, Lanchester says, is too simplistic a view of family life.

Most families are both happy and unhappy: “A sense of safety can be a feeling of trappedness; a delight in routine can be suffocating boredom; a parent’s humour and unpredictability can be maddeningly misplaced childlikeness — and, in many cases, the feeling is simultaneous.” Lanchester says, as a child he was both happy and unhappy and so were his parents. So are all families.

Another similarity between families — and this is the point of departure of Lanchester’s remarkable and poignant memoir — is that all families have secrets. The nature of the secrets vary. There can be secrets that families keep from outsiders; there are other secrets which families in fact succeed in keeping from themselves. The latter kind — secrets that are deliberately suppressed or glossed over — are the more intriguing ones. Their suppression and their eventual surfacing are both significant for understanding a family, its happiness and its unhappiness.

Lanchester delves into the lives of his parents to discover their secrets and why they were suppressed. His detective work is painstaking and some of it must have been painful as well. Lanchester obviously had a very complex relationship with his mother, who in her turn was an extraordinarily dominating and complex person. She almost always had her own way, but this should not suggest that her life was without hardship and agony. She had changed her identity and her date of birth. There was an aura of mystery over large arcs of her life. It is this mystery that Lanchester solves in this book. It is also a journey into his own interiority.

The way Lanchester tells the story makes it more than the account of one family. The lives of individuals, he always sets against a particular socio-historical background. Thus we have bits of Irish history; a detailed account of life in a convent in Madras in the Forties and Fifties; life in colonial South Africa and Hong Kong and of course, in Britain. What emerges is a rich and variegated social history told through the life of one family.

The book defies classification, but the story is moving.