Top 10 books about fathers

From Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney, the author selects his favourites from a tradition where the most interesting characters are very often absent

Until recently, I did not seek out books about fathers. Perhaps because, until two-and-a-half years ago, I had a father of my own who seemed as good a parent as anyone could hope for. But when Karl Miller died in September 2014, I began, in a state of loss and grief, to write about him. Only then did I begin to reflect on how others had written about fathers and fatherhood, and only then did I start to seek solace and understanding in fatherly stories.

Many of my favourite childhood books, I soon realised, had no fathers, or fathers who were unimportant: Tintin, Doctor Dolittle and The Lord of the Rings, for instance. I did like the way Babar the Elephant played with his children, and the devotion shown by Dr Seuss’s Horton, another elephant, to the business of hatching a bird’s egg. But other near-perfect fathers, like Atticus Finch and Bob Cratchit, seemed a little insipid.

Indeed, the most interesting fathers were often the ones who were no longer around, or who inhabited the world of ghosts. And so I also began to light upon those who were searching for dead fathers, and saw how the search for a lost father drove narratives throughout the history of literature, forcing Aeneas into the underworld, and leading Hamlet on the road to disaster. But my choice of 10 books here has to begin with another Shakespeare play.

1. King Lear by William Shakespeare
The fatherhood text. Not only does Lear mis-father his daughters, but the Duke of Gloucester is disastrously unfatherly toward his illegitimate son, Edmund. All with catastrophic results, making Lear something of a manual for being a bad father. Careful readers of my book, Fathers, will notice an unplanned Lear theme running through the book.

2. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
A beautifully written, passionate, grief-stricken book about dealing with the loss of a father whom she describes at one point as her “partner in crime”. But the book is much more than that, and contains wonderful portraits of the Arthurian novelist TH White and a hard-to-tame goshawk by the name of Mabel.

3. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
I read this graphic novel soon after my father’s death, but it still made me laugh. Bechdel’s father has died and is to be seen in his coffin. She rummages, in words and images, through her father’s life and closeted sexuality – as well as their shared interest in James Joyce.

4. My Father and Myself by JR Ackerley
This is an old favourite of mine which I read soon after discovering Ackerley’s fine India memoir, Hindoo Holiday. Following his father’s death, the author discovers that “the Banana King of London” – as he was known – had another family, and he had three half-sisters. First published in 1968, it’s very funny and deserves to be better known.

5. Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter
A father looks after his two young boys after their mother’s death. A memoir of bereavement told in pitch-perfect prose that is both playful and meditative, and sometimes painfully humorous. A feathered creature based on Ted Hughes’s Crow is the surprise star.

6. And When Did You Last See Your Father? by Blake Morrison
This 1993 portrait of Morrison’s father is often said to have inspired a generation of confessional writing. It has a superb opening scene, involving a long queue of cars outside a motor racing track, during the course of which key elements of Arthur Morrison’s character are established. And it gets better and better, funnier and sadder.

7. Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming
The nastiest father I have come across in my reading is, sadly, not fictional. Cumming, a celebrated actor, recalls how “every second of [his] childhood was filled with the possibility that in an instant my father’s mood would plunge into irrationality, rage and ultimately violence”. Young Alan survives, and then thrives, but the shadow remains.

8. Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo
Fathers are largely absent from Izzo’s brilliant and shamefully neglected Marseille Trilogy, but there’s a fine cameo in the first of the series, Total Chaos. Mouloud is a migrant from Algeria to France, and nervously watched his three motherless children grow up in Marseille. But the eldest, a postgraduate student called Laila, has gone missing and is subsequently found murdered. Mouloud’s desperation is unbearable.

9. Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney
Heaney’s father appears in four poems in his first collection. And the book opens with Digging, in which Heaney recalls that: “By God, the old man could handle a spade.” These words would be repeated back to me, in quite unexpected circumstances, as I dug around, squat pen in hand, researching my paternity for Fathers, some 50 years after its publication. And the first publisher of Digging, in 1964 in the New Statesman, was a young literary editor called Karl Miller.

10. Rebecca’s Vest by Karl Miller
My own father’s beautiful, eccentric memoir, full of wonderful prose, and illuminating digressions. Not strictly a book about fathers, but his dad, William, whom he hardly knew as a child, plays a major role in the opening chapters. William was a penniless painter who subsisted on Ryvita and prunes, and who wrote to my father: “You were most unfortunate in the family you were born into – and that includes myself, of course.”

Contributor

Sam Miller

The GuardianTramp

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