Family Romance - a love story by John Lanchester: book review

Wikipedia.org

Lanchester’s 2007 memoir commences with his mother, the central focus of his life. Not because she is his mother, but because her story is fascinating, intriguing, heart-warming, protective, private and, above all, secret. It’s her secret that Lanchester discovers after her death.

In revealing his mother’s secret, he commences with her life, and the life of her parents, before she meets his father. The story of his father, and the life of his parents, is equally interesting. Then they meet, and that’s when his mother does something for love: something that she hides for the rest of her life: something unethical, criminal, and exceptionally easy to do at the time. But her guilt and anxiety continues throughout her life.

Family Romance is a tale of constant uprooting to live in different countries, a tale of boarding schools and abandonment, a tale of disconnectedness and loneliness, of multiple identities, and of panic.

Psychologically, as you read it, you could be reading about someone you know – your mother, your father, your sisters, your brothers, your grandparents, your loved ones, your friends, your work colleagues and associates. Familiar personality traits and characteristics emerge and many readers will understand and empathize – if they didn’t before, they will after. Lanchester tells the story of his mother’s life, and of her love of his father, in a way that slowly opens the doors to his own life. He objectively relates the good, the bad, the ugly and the secret side of his family – when decisions are made, and why they are made. He describes his investigation as “three kinds of detective work”: (1) finding out what his parents did and what was done to them - “straightforward for my father and not at all so for my mother, who covered her traces well and never gave anything away”; (2) trying to find out what his parents felt about what happened and why they did the things they did; and (3) trying to work out how he felt and thought – “that is something we all need to do about who we are and where we come from.”

Interspersed between the pages is an historical report of colonial England and a post-colonial life; of international travel, of expatriates living abroad, and of the lives of his family in places such as Hong Kong, India, Brunei, Germany, England and Burma. Although born in Hamburg, Germany, living most of his life in Hong Kong, with an Irish heritage, he boarded and studied in England, where he now lives, and where his parents finally rest.

It’s one of the most poignant, insightful, investigative, historical memoirs I’ve read.