Jonathan Raban completed this, his last testament, just before he died, aged 80, in January. As well as a leave-taking, it offers a belated salute to a father from his son. The title echoes the great Edmund Gosse memoir of 1907, a reckoning of filial relations that shocked its Edwardian readership and broached a new candour in life-writing. This new Father and Son will cause nothing like the sensation that Gosse’s did, though it does teasingly hint at the ambiguous blessing of a father who doubles as a man of the cloth.
A British exile in Seattle since 1990, Raban was one of those writers who stood at an angle to his native land. A keen sailor, a journeyman and latterly father of a teenage daughter, he occupies a strange space in Anglo-American letters, the language casually adoptive (“math”, “faucet”, etc), the temperament defiantly of the old country – exacting, proud, somewhat pedantic. He is a writer always on his guard, a good listener, and wonderfully quick to take offence.
The book’s first line makes an impressive jolt: “I was transformed into an old man quite suddenly, on June 11, 2011, three days short of my 69th birthday.” His coup de vieux is a stroke that paralyses his entire right side and plunges him into a frustrating (often humiliating) new world of rehab, wheelchair-bound and prey to the pitying condescension of the able-bodied. When a nurse asks him: “Do you want to go potty now?” you can almost hear the steam hissing from his ears. High blood pressure, alas, was a condition Raban had left unmedicated, and he’d also been a lifelong smoker. He does the “math”. It’s almost a solace to him that 69 is the “median age” for stroke victims.
At least his marbles are intact. His undamaged hand can hold his Kindle, and he can still write, beautifully, alternating his autopathography with an account of his parents’ early marriage and its disruption by the war. Peter Raban was an unhappy schoolteacher who found his metier as a soldier, his first scrape at the evacuation of Dunkirk the prelude to a “good war”, in north Africa, then Italy, finally in Egypt. The book extensively quotes from the passionate letters that travel between Peter in his latest unholy billet and wife Monica, fretting at home in rural Norfolk with the mother-in-law and her beloved first-born for company. Listening along to the BBC Home Service, the infant Jonathan is perfectly content to be the apple of his mother’s eye, while his father remains offstage, “a distant rumour”. This invisible relationship will, as for so many war babies, store up trouble in time for Daddy’s homecoming (if he comes home at all). Meanwhile his mother, nervously class-conscious, refuses to let the boy play with the village children, rough products of what she calls “knocky-down schools”.
Class, in fact, becomes a persistent theme. Peter Raban, scion of a family that made good under the British Raj, always believed in the hierarchy of caste, and his promotion to major salved his lifelong shame at missing out on Oxbridge. Unlike well-born officers who may have felt sympathy with their working-class subordinates, he remained devoted to the idea of people knowing their place. When Monica wrote to him wondering if she should take in a bombed-out mother and child from London, Peter replied with a disapproval bordering on panic. The cockney is a good sort in war, he explains, but out of action is grumbling, bone-idle and difficult to get rid of: “be careful, Beloved, and don’t let your humanity override ‘commonsense’”. Question: how did this man become an Anglican vicar? The snobbery that amazes us today was probably quite acceptable in 1940s England, though Raban suggests, pace his father’s distaste, the officer class’s new comprehension of the men beneath them (and of their social and economic woes) may have triggered the Labour party’s landslide election victory in July 1945.
What the son makes of his father is complicated, his father being a snob and an antisemite, but also a brave man who endured unspeakable horrors at Anzio and emerged with honour. It’s a portrait of the father, not a judgment of him, which in the face of their relationship is a credit to the son. Only, where is the relationship? Unlike Gosse, Raban hardly ever shows himself in the company of his father. This non-meeting is the book’s estranging flaw. How did the two of them fare once Peter returned home, each with their claim on Monica, each a usurper to the other? We get the occasional hint that Raban and his brothers weren’t always at peace with the old man, always “lending a sympathetic ear to other people’s misfortunes… not a talent he invariably practised when it came to his own sons”. The halves of the book don’t fit together, don’t really comment on each other. It’s two stories from the beginning and the end of a writer’s life, with the vital middle – the link – missing. What did the father make of his son, the successful writer, liberal, agnostic, thrice divorced? We will never know, not from Raban’s pen in any event.
Perhaps in the end he couldn’t bear to examine it. Perhaps ill health and his incapacity got the better of him. There is a moving moment towards the end of the book when Raban considers the fate of other writers felled by a stroke. In the case of Dr Johnson, who begged the Almighty to spare his reason, the prayer was answered – his mighty brain had survived. Henry James was not so lucky, and his writing, post-stroke, betrays “a mind in disintegration”. Raban admits that, 11 years after his own calamity, he asks himself two questions every day: “What have I lost? and Am I fooling myself? But I find both questions maddeningly unanswerable.” I fear Father and Son isn’t quite the book his fans will be hoping for, the book that would crown his achievement as a writer. Still, we’ll remember Coasting and Hunting Mr Heartbreak and Surveillance, and think: what a writer.
• Father and Son by Jonathan Raban is published by Picador (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
