A review of 'Man and Boy' by Tony Parsons
Note: The following review was originally published at Amazon.co.uk on 16th. August 2017. Link to original review: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R3GBIAJN7Y0KP5?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
Harry Silver is a happily-married TV producer approaching his thirtieth birthday. He and his wife, Gina, have a four-year-old son, Pat. Gina is something of a Japanophile, and is fluent in the language, but it was decided that she would be a housewife and look after Pat and things at home, thus sacrificing a potentially promising career as a commercial translator of Japanese - though it should be said that the fact that many Japanese companies in the City were going under at that time also played a role in the decision.
Everything seems to be going well. The TV career is taking off - Harry is producing a high-profile comedy show - Gina seems content, as does Pat, and she prides herself on taking a traditional approach to parenting, not wanting Pat to be looked after by strangers. She explicitly rejects the 80s mantra that women "can have it all" - i.e. a career and a family - and instead commits herself to looking after Pat so that he will not grow up without her - "I don't want his childhood to be like mine", she says at one point [p. 18]. But Harry suspects her heart isn't truly in it and that they are both shadowing these traditional parenting roles rather than fulfilling them.
Then Harry decides to buy a sports car, a proposal that is met with Gina's (surprising) approval, and that's when things start to go wrong for them. Harry foolishly has a one-night stand with a good-looking assistant at the TV studio, Gina finds out, and she decides to leave both him and Pat behind and resume her career by taking a translating job with a bank in Japan.
Harry is therefore left to look after Pat. Gina keeps in touch by phone, but the marriage is over. Harry meets another woman, an American expat called Cyd, who has a daughter called Peggy. Problems often come in threes, and on the work front Harry suddenly finds himself unemployed. He eventually secures a new role as an executive producer, mentoring a young Irish TV comedian, Eamon, who suffers badly from stage fright.
Man and Boy is not normally the sort of novel I like to read, and I have to be honest and say I’ve never particularly liked the author, a centre-left tabloid newspaper columnist with rather orthodox politically-correct views. This was written in the New Man era: the 1990s, when feminism started to take-off in Britain, and given that it was hyped on release, I was not expecting much. Indeed, it is a difficult read at first, a bit cringe-worthy and full of pop references, and the mundane vicissitudes and entanglements of the main character in and of themselves don’t interest me much. There was a risk that this novel would drift into the hum-drum meanderings of a rather dull character, in the manner of a soap opera or modish kitchen sink dramas, but in book form. However, I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised and the message I took from the story is not at all what I had anticipated from the author.
This novel is, surprisingly, an anti-modern epistle against feminism, though I am not sure this was what the author intended. It’s also an apologia for the real-life Harry Silvers and the institution of fatherhood, as well as an apology to modern feminism’s victims: children like Pat. Harry’s parents help him look after Pat, so we see the value of grandparents and extended families. Harry’s father, Patrick, represents an older, warmer, more sentimental and duty-bound past that was also harsher, rawer, smellier, and impoverished, but in some ways kinder than the modern world; it was a time of great passions in which there was love and war, patriotism and heroism, and it meant something to be English, people had very simple and direct views about things - including criminals, single parents and benefit claimants. The modern world, in contrast, is pastel-coloured and sanitised but colder and crueller. There is no firm sense of identity. Inevitably, Harry looks back to the past nostalgically and sentimentally in order to find something to cling on to: in that respect, the Englishness of the novel and Parsons comes to the fore. Harry monologues the experiences of a normal boy growing up in southern England: the open countryside, the housing estates, the dog track, old pubs with horse brasses, the smell of hot dogs, women drinking Babycham, East End streets, and so on. He sees these things vividly and imaginatively in his memory as the motifs of a simple and innocent world, but not as sharply in the present, and he interprets this as evidence of the decline of these things in favour of what seems like a less innocent and more complex society. There is no war and no love in this modern world, passions are facsimiled, though Harry does not fully realise it; it’s a world in which Harry has to worry about the fact that Pat is in the habit of hugging strangers. Harry’s parents stayed together because of the struggles they experienced together - the war Patrick fought in, the lack of money and so on. Harry has no war to fight, no battle wounds, there is nothing to keep him and Gina together. They have lots of money – Harry has enough to buy a sports car – but that can’t save their marriage. There is something missing in their lives. Harry is lost in a complex and ambiguous world, in which there is moral confusion, and confusion about identity, and uncertainty about what it means to be a man and how to be a father. His parents had certainties to rest on.
Harry is a good father, but he doesn’t know it, as he is still conceptually grappling with what a man is, never mind what makes a father. There are some very affectionate and well-crafted scenes between Harry and Pat which show that a father need not be distant. Emotional aloofness on the part of fathers (and mothers) causes many problems for children, especially boys, and a lack of such support can lead to problems later in life, but Harry seems to intuitively grasp this aspect of fatherhood. Harry genuinely loves his son and the author is able to put this across brilliantly. Then there is the involvement of Harry’s father, Patrick. I actually think Patrick is the best character in this. He steals the show – putting Harry himself in the shade - and is the heart of the novel, certainly my favourite. I also learnt a new word from Patrick: skylarking. The scene in which Patrick gets Pat to ride his Bluebell push-bike without stabilisers for the first time is very touching and will stay with me.
Parsons cleverly draws out the fatherhood theme beyond the family itself. Harry and Eamon have a figurative sort of father-son relationship, which reflects the way that many of the relationships in society among men, both private and occupational, tend to follow a father/son or man/boy dichotomy. Perhaps the counterpoise is crude and simplistic. Does seeking advice or lacking experience necessarily make you a boy figuratively? Lots of mature and experienced men are still in need of advice about general life issues. Anyway, Harry fulfils a fatherly role for Eamon and helps him overcome his lack of confidence. Eamon is made to seem boyish or immature, not just professionally but in his private attitudes, though I am not sure this is fair. Whether Parsons intends it or not, there are really two types of man presented in this novel: those like Patrick who sacrifice for both family and also for country, out of love for both, and have duties and obligations they keep to the end; and those like Eamon who understand women perhaps a little better than Patrick and Harry do and live their own lives without the burden of non-selfish sacrifice and responsibility.
A great deal of what defines a ‘man’ is influenced by his attitude to and actions around women. Patrick and Harry are fairly conventional in this regard. Eamon not so. He tells us:
[quote]”I’m a man, Harry. And the reason I’m here is to plant my seed in as many places as I possibly can. That’s why we’re here. That’s what men do.”[unquote] [p. 179].
This may be thought a despicable attitude, but I am not so sure. To explain why, I will detour a little into a cinematic analogy. Mention is made in this novel of the film Cinema Paradiso, Cyd offering a basic analysis of the film’s meaning. It just so happens that Giuseppe Tornatore’s masterpiece is one of my favourite films. It’s a picture that has had a profound effect on me, and this coincidence partly persuaded me to give Parsons’ novel a positive review. Eamon is a little like Toto, in that he is independent-minded, does not live his life in the patterned, somewhat predictable way that Harry and before him, Patrick, have. Instead Eamon has pursued his dreams and, while Patrick and Harry value integrity, Eamon places his stock in authenticity: he repeatedly refers back to Kilcarney, a small village in Ireland where he comes from, but at the same time, he emphasises that he is not stuck in Kilcarney, any more than Toto was stuck in his Sicilian village.
Harry is clearly frustrated with his patterned life, as is Gina underneath. The purchase of the sports car I suppose is meant to symbolise this point and also the notion that Harry is a sort of boy-man, not at that stage fully a man in the mould of his father. But it’s an unlikely plot development. Would a fairly ordinary middle-class man with an infant son really buy a sports car? I believe not. There are a number of very simple, practical reasons it’s unlikely.
As Patrick puts it:
[quote]”Completely impractical, a car like that….Nowhere for the children, is there? A man has to think of those things when he buys a motor. Or he should do.”[unquote] [p. 186].
I think most men would regard it as a waste of money, if not a guarantee of bankruptcy, but the sports car in the story is probably not intended to be believable. It’s a literary device for the reasons already explained, and it also reflects a cliché about men, though in fairness, some real people do lead clichéd lives. This author writes in clichés, and himself probably lives in clichés too. A certain type of person is susceptible to social influences and will pattern their life after popular culture and received messages in advertising, films and magazines and what have you.
I’m also not sure about the crux of the plot that has Gina suddenly want to leave for Japan and plan this as a firm and serious intention. I think it not likely that she would leave behind Harry, and - let’s not forget - her own son too, and emigrate to the other side of the world just after one fling. But she does, and within the framework of the story, Gina is taking this decision because, as she sees it, she has the right to pursue her own dreams. Harry’s brief infidelity has provided a pretext, if not a justification, for this shift in her attitude. It’s fuzzy whether her dream is really a deep desire to pursue a vocation immersed in an alien culture that she loves or a more base desire for reward and recognition and therefore not an acculturation at all. Some of the dialogue offers us a clue.
Initially Gina laments, as she sees it, the lack of respect afforded to motherhood:
[quote]”Looking after your child – it should really be the most respected job in the world. It should be worth more than going to any office. But it’s not. Do you know how many people at your f____ little television dinners and parties and launches have made me feel like nothing at all?”[unquote] [p. 56].
But is it true that mothers are or were not respected? This is really a bogus complaint, I think; an unkind person might suggest that she is subconsciously concealing a wish not to be burdened with motherhood. As if to confirm the accuracy of that suspicion, presently the author has Gina say this to Harry:
[quote]”I want my life back…..That’s all, Harry. I want my life back.” [unquote] [p. 57].
She then promptly moves to Japan, leaving behind her husband, Harry, and her son, Pat, which suggests that the real problem in such situations can be an unwillingness on the part of some women to face up to their responsibilities. By leaving for Japan and putting her career before her son, Gina was confirming that she was the one devaluing motherhood. Nobody had devalued it for her. Loyalty to her husband and the important role of bringing up her son was suddenly not as important as working for a Japanese bank. This is the paradox of conservative feminism, in that it asserts the value of women’s traditional role while at the same time encouraging women to abrogate somewhat their responsibilities as mothers, most commonly by delegating childcare to professionals.
Harry is therefore left looking after Pat, while also trying to find work to pay the mortgage and the bills, but Gina is quite unusual in this regard: women in general don’t reject motherhood so fully. Even the ambitious ones jealously guard the role – look at sites like Mumsnet, full of comfortable middle-class mothers who don’t seem to mind their biologically-ordained status. Women are in fact proud of their traditional role and, rather in the manner of 70s shop stewards looking on non-unionised employees, tend to eye single fathers suspiciously, if not with a healthy dose of contempt. In this novel, the single mothers that Harry encounters on the school run are suspicious and stand-offish towards him - he is made to feel like an “oddball” or “defective male” [p. 173] in their presence. Nevertheless, Harry soon ‘goes native’ in some respects. Mothers tend to be very judgemental about other mothers and quite opinionated in the matter of how children should be brought up, not to mention lots of other topics – see Mumsnet - and Harry picks some of this up. Parenting seems to be something that everybody thinks they are best at and everybody else is assumed to be bad at.
Is parenting an art or a science? Is it something that is handed down through the generations, intuitive and experiential, or is it scientific and potentially learnable from textbooks? I recall in school that there was a subject called Childcare Studies (or similar) taken up by girls (and a few feminine boys). Trotsky in the early years of the Soviet Union attempted to professionalise childcare, with the intention of putting children in the hands of the state. But this stuff crosses the political divide. The Nazi regime in 1930s Germany tried something similar, but with older, teenage children: the Hitler Youth. A central plank of New Labour policy was the comprehensive provision of childcare, so that women would go out and work: a policy very popular with capitalists and big business, who want women in the workforce because they are cheap and pliable. The right-winger commentator Stefan Molyneux encourages the break-up of immediate family ties. All these initiatives suggest that there is at least a belief that parenting is learnable and can be practised by non-parents with children that they have no biological connection to. But parents, whether they are good at the role or not, have the bond of blood and love their children unconditionally. Step-parents are a special case in that although they are not bonded with their children by blood, they are still family.
Harry Silver reflects on this issue in regard to Peggy, and the potential that he may be involved in her upbringing as her step-father should the relationship with her mother, Cyd, develop further. In regard to the special challenges of step-parents:
[quote]”But you can’t compete with blood.”[unquote] [p. 197].
But step-parents can learn to be good parents. Harry has to learn with Pat in any case, why not with Peggy? There is no course available to him, no preparation for day-to-day challenges of parenting, he just has to play it by ear. Therefore, parenting seems more of an art than a science, but with some definite principles that arrogant mothers would be only too ready to point out in the event that Harry slips up.
We are conditioned to believe that Harry’s is an unusual situation, but in the past – I believe up until the early 20th. century in England - the default position in a separation and marriage break-up would have been that the child stayed with the father. This made sense in a patriarchal society in which women were largely dependent on men in all respects, social and financial. The general assumption that in a parental separation the residence of the children should be with mother is a modern innovation, and if it seems intuitively correct to us today, that is only because we have been influenced to think that way. Parsons’ solicitor-character rightly points out in this novel that the law is theoretically supposed to balance the interests of the mother and father now when it comes to deciding residence rights, but one imagines in practice that things will lean heavily in the mother’s favour, due to an innate bias among chivalrous judges operating under modern, post-War cultural assumptions about the priority of the mother in the upbringing of children.
The focus on Harry’s relationship with his son and his qualities as a father obscures somewhat the relationship that I found much more interesting: between Harry and his own father, Patrick. I think it is assumed that Patrick was a terrific father – Harry certainly thinks so. Patrick, very much a man’s man, smells of Old Spice and Old Holborn, has a commando tattoo (from the War), can hold his own in a fight – but is also gentle and sentimental, especially about children - and never had to assert his authority explicitly, as it was culturally the norm in those days that the father role was respected; whereas Harry has to cope with the challenges incumbent in modernity: a time of complexity and ambiguity in the social roles of men. Patrick’s working class, Everyman interests: gambling, drinking, fighting, have become pathologised by sanitised modernity. Manhood is under attack, but Patrick just escaped this, it is Harry who got the full blast of it.
But was Patrick really a good father to Harry? I have been giving this some serious thought, and my conclusion is that, tragically, he wasn’t. Harry seems seriously maladjusted emotionally: a romantic with unrealistic ideas about relationships, something that has and is damaging him. He also seems to suffer from a need to emulate his father in order to prove he is a grown-up, a real Man, just like him. Patrick was a working class man who became a middle-class man, retaining his essential working class identity. Harry is just middle-class, and has all the mores, frustrations and concerns of a typical middle-class man from London: holidays, money, media career, childcare, etc. He suffers from deep psychic insecurity. Where did this insecurity come from? The father? He does sound like quite an overbearing character, in sharp contrast to his son. Perhaps it also stems from the upward mobility of his father. I think both his parents have also let Harry down in his emotional development. They shaped his understanding of relationships unrealistically and his father in particular should have given him information about women. Harry seems to have come away with a model of relationships from out of the 1950s, with the idea the marriage is sustained by romantic love. Some men in real-life cling to this naïve and unreformed perspective on monogamy, to the extent that they even agree to bring up other men’s children.
For Harry, the result of this is a psychologically crippling inability to pursue an authentic life and be true to himself, like Toto does in Cinema Paradiso. Just as he has a rather unhealthy insecurity about his father, Harry has a sycophantic perception of women and pedestalises them. On the legal front, he leaves himself wide open: in a real-life separation, the father, having secured de facto residence of the child in a perfectly legal and lawful manner, as Harry does in this story, would not risk this by allowing the child to stay with the mother unsupervised, as Harry then foolishly goes on to do. He trusts Gina too easily. At the very least, his solicitor would be advising against this, because Gina could just refuse to hand the child back. On the romantic front, Harry is looking for ‘the one’, which was Gina, now he thinks it’s Cyd. His love life is a series of one-woman infatuations, premised on the belief that one girl can be ‘special’ to him. This psychological crutch disarms him when dealing with women, both particularly and generally. At one point, the author has Harry in his monologue wax lyrically about single mothers as “heroes”:
[quote]”They were doing it all by themselves. Shopping, cooking, entertaining, everything. They were bringing up their children alone.”[unquote]
But they are not heroes. They are just mothers doing what they are supposed to do.
Do we tell the truth about women in our society? Why do men indulge and tolerate women in this way? Women do have affairs and cheat. Harry naively assumes they don’t. We dress women up in white at weddings, which I would assume is meant to signify virginity, but few (if any) women today marry as virgins, so in modern terms maybe the white signifies instead renewal and starting-over – or perhaps it just signifies a lie and the groom should take heed. If it’s clear that monogamy is unsustainable, then why marry?
Gina also suffers from much the same deluded notions about monogamy as Harry does. Both are trapped in their patterned existences in which they ape after clichés learned from romantic films, books, magazines and pop songs, almost as a soundtrack and motion picture depiction of their lives, all creating and fuelling unrealistic and unsustainable expectations.
At one point, Gina tells Harry:
[quote]”Of course I love you, you stupid bastard. But I’m not in love with you.”[unquote] [p. 105].
This bubble reality is only fractured when Harry selfishly buys a sports car, seeking escape from his frustration with the mundanity of ordinary manhood: the grind of going to work, paying mortgage, fixing things, etc. In the case of Gina, Harry’s infidelity provided a pretext for her to escape the mundanity of looking after their child. Thus, the break in the pattern, Harry’s sports car, set off a chain of events that unravels their sham relationship. To dissolve one’s delusions and see the world for what it is requires courage – and maybe a little cruelty – as Alfredo was cruel to Toto, the boy in Cinema Paradiso: a real example of tough love. Toto needs to let go of the little Sicilian village and his girl there in order to achieve his dreams.
However it is unclear whether Harry has understood this crucial point. For most of the story, he is still psychologically trapped within his marriage to Gina - in his mind he loves her - experiencing the sort of dissonance and frustration that has discouraged Millennials from marrying. The institution of marriage never went through a reformation to allow for changes in wider society, instead it has been smashed asunder: religiously, civically, socially, politically and economically. Harry, when considering his situation and the wider issues, continually reaches wrong conclusions: he thinks that the nuclear family is based on love, not understanding that marriage, like any other type of relationship, is an arrangement based on pragmatism, in which two people who can tolerate each other better than they can tolerate anybody else, in order to bring up a family and provide for themselves. It’s not like Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta. If a marriage works, then the romance goes – indeed, a good marriage depends on this development - and is replaced with affection and companionship. That leads to boredom and a need for escapism – as life can come to be seen as monotonous and frustrating – hence the mid-life crisis. In this novel, Harry has a sort of early mid-life crisis.
Do relationships hold us back? Relationships ought to be the basis of success and can be exactly that where two people share the same dreams, but where two people are unalike and do not have the same vision and goals, marriage can become a millstone for one or both. In Cinema Paradiso, the old man, Alfredo, believed that the village had nothing to offer Toto, nor did the girl, so he made him go away to make his way and become successful. Marrying Harry has held back Gina – she wanted to pursue her interest in another culture, Japan - but at the same time she has a child. Marriage has also possibly held back Harry. However, the message of Cinema Paradiso is not perfect either. Far from it. The film director that Toto became was quite a sad man and, although famous and successful in his chosen field, he had not achieved happiness and romantic actualisation. The solution, I believe, is a reformation of marriage as an institution, in that it should return to its purpose of providing stability in society and assuring the full independence from the state of families and private lives.
To that end, people should return to the tradition of marrying earlier in life, during their late teens, in arranged marriages. This would then provide the bedrock stability for their lives and encourage the formulation of shared goals - marriage as a partnership – at an early point before fixed ideas and plans for one’s future crystallise. Instead, marriage has become a romantic thing – based on received ideas from popular culture that have no basis in human nature – and is therefore just a plastic rite of passage that can be sloughed-off when people become bored with it, with children as an after-thought or as possessions to be fought over. Hence, far from assisting in clarifying goals, marriage holds people back. Alfredo saw that Toto had unrealistic romantic aspirations and instead needed to live his life. A similar point applies to Gina and Harry.
I am surprised at myself in giving Tony Parsons, of all people, five stars: and for a much-hyped novel at that, but there it is. Sometimes the hype is justified. I had assumed this would be fatuous rubbish, but I always review books on their own merits. There is some unctuousness in here in the author's treatment of the issues around women and children; he (or rather his character) presents a picture of somebody who is a bit drippy and too keen to please others. I also think we could have gone without most, if not all, of the foul language: the story would have very broad appeal across different age groups, including older children even, if it weren’t for the constant f-ing and blinding. I don’t accept the naturalistic argument that some authors and critics use to justify this sort of thing. Even if real people swear as much as this, in my opinion it shouldn’t be in a novel that is telling a story about ‘nice’ middle-class people. Yes it could be realistic, but when it’s put in print it distracts from the story and seems overly modish and condescending, almost as if the author is trying to affect realism when he needn’t. I think in general writers should be more careful about swearing. I am not being priggish: I don’t object to swearing when it is contextually necessary and it is done right; my objection here is on purely stylistic grounds – it’s just ugly and irritating to read, rather like listening to a pianist repeatedly hit the wrong key. It’s about knowing not just what a character might say, but also how it will be processed by the reader.
But quibbling aside, overall I am glad I read this and I did find myself sympathising with the main character, Harry Silver: which is always a sign of something that is well-written and that the author has put his heart and soul into, and this is one such case. I therefore take my hat off to Tony Parsons and thank him. Books do sometimes produce surprises: and as they say, never judge a book by its cover, which is certainly good advice. It's a very good novel, and it's not just for women. You can be a man, or even a boy, and still like this.
Everything seems to be going well. The TV career is taking off - Harry is producing a high-profile comedy show - Gina seems content, as does Pat, and she prides herself on taking a traditional approach to parenting, not wanting Pat to be looked after by strangers. She explicitly rejects the 80s mantra that women "can have it all" - i.e. a career and a family - and instead commits herself to looking after Pat so that he will not grow up without her - "I don't want his childhood to be like mine", she says at one point [p. 18]. But Harry suspects her heart isn't truly in it and that they are both shadowing these traditional parenting roles rather than fulfilling them.
Then Harry decides to buy a sports car, a proposal that is met with Gina's (surprising) approval, and that's when things start to go wrong for them. Harry foolishly has a one-night stand with a good-looking assistant at the TV studio, Gina finds out, and she decides to leave both him and Pat behind and resume her career by taking a translating job with a bank in Japan.
Harry is therefore left to look after Pat. Gina keeps in touch by phone, but the marriage is over. Harry meets another woman, an American expat called Cyd, who has a daughter called Peggy. Problems often come in threes, and on the work front Harry suddenly finds himself unemployed. He eventually secures a new role as an executive producer, mentoring a young Irish TV comedian, Eamon, who suffers badly from stage fright.
Man and Boy is not normally the sort of novel I like to read, and I have to be honest and say I’ve never particularly liked the author, a centre-left tabloid newspaper columnist with rather orthodox politically-correct views. This was written in the New Man era: the 1990s, when feminism started to take-off in Britain, and given that it was hyped on release, I was not expecting much. Indeed, it is a difficult read at first, a bit cringe-worthy and full of pop references, and the mundane vicissitudes and entanglements of the main character in and of themselves don’t interest me much. There was a risk that this novel would drift into the hum-drum meanderings of a rather dull character, in the manner of a soap opera or modish kitchen sink dramas, but in book form. However, I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised and the message I took from the story is not at all what I had anticipated from the author.
This novel is, surprisingly, an anti-modern epistle against feminism, though I am not sure this was what the author intended. It’s also an apologia for the real-life Harry Silvers and the institution of fatherhood, as well as an apology to modern feminism’s victims: children like Pat. Harry’s parents help him look after Pat, so we see the value of grandparents and extended families. Harry’s father, Patrick, represents an older, warmer, more sentimental and duty-bound past that was also harsher, rawer, smellier, and impoverished, but in some ways kinder than the modern world; it was a time of great passions in which there was love and war, patriotism and heroism, and it meant something to be English, people had very simple and direct views about things - including criminals, single parents and benefit claimants. The modern world, in contrast, is pastel-coloured and sanitised but colder and crueller. There is no firm sense of identity. Inevitably, Harry looks back to the past nostalgically and sentimentally in order to find something to cling on to: in that respect, the Englishness of the novel and Parsons comes to the fore. Harry monologues the experiences of a normal boy growing up in southern England: the open countryside, the housing estates, the dog track, old pubs with horse brasses, the smell of hot dogs, women drinking Babycham, East End streets, and so on. He sees these things vividly and imaginatively in his memory as the motifs of a simple and innocent world, but not as sharply in the present, and he interprets this as evidence of the decline of these things in favour of what seems like a less innocent and more complex society. There is no war and no love in this modern world, passions are facsimiled, though Harry does not fully realise it; it’s a world in which Harry has to worry about the fact that Pat is in the habit of hugging strangers. Harry’s parents stayed together because of the struggles they experienced together - the war Patrick fought in, the lack of money and so on. Harry has no war to fight, no battle wounds, there is nothing to keep him and Gina together. They have lots of money – Harry has enough to buy a sports car – but that can’t save their marriage. There is something missing in their lives. Harry is lost in a complex and ambiguous world, in which there is moral confusion, and confusion about identity, and uncertainty about what it means to be a man and how to be a father. His parents had certainties to rest on.
Harry is a good father, but he doesn’t know it, as he is still conceptually grappling with what a man is, never mind what makes a father. There are some very affectionate and well-crafted scenes between Harry and Pat which show that a father need not be distant. Emotional aloofness on the part of fathers (and mothers) causes many problems for children, especially boys, and a lack of such support can lead to problems later in life, but Harry seems to intuitively grasp this aspect of fatherhood. Harry genuinely loves his son and the author is able to put this across brilliantly. Then there is the involvement of Harry’s father, Patrick. I actually think Patrick is the best character in this. He steals the show – putting Harry himself in the shade - and is the heart of the novel, certainly my favourite. I also learnt a new word from Patrick: skylarking. The scene in which Patrick gets Pat to ride his Bluebell push-bike without stabilisers for the first time is very touching and will stay with me.
Parsons cleverly draws out the fatherhood theme beyond the family itself. Harry and Eamon have a figurative sort of father-son relationship, which reflects the way that many of the relationships in society among men, both private and occupational, tend to follow a father/son or man/boy dichotomy. Perhaps the counterpoise is crude and simplistic. Does seeking advice or lacking experience necessarily make you a boy figuratively? Lots of mature and experienced men are still in need of advice about general life issues. Anyway, Harry fulfils a fatherly role for Eamon and helps him overcome his lack of confidence. Eamon is made to seem boyish or immature, not just professionally but in his private attitudes, though I am not sure this is fair. Whether Parsons intends it or not, there are really two types of man presented in this novel: those like Patrick who sacrifice for both family and also for country, out of love for both, and have duties and obligations they keep to the end; and those like Eamon who understand women perhaps a little better than Patrick and Harry do and live their own lives without the burden of non-selfish sacrifice and responsibility.
A great deal of what defines a ‘man’ is influenced by his attitude to and actions around women. Patrick and Harry are fairly conventional in this regard. Eamon not so. He tells us:
[quote]”I’m a man, Harry. And the reason I’m here is to plant my seed in as many places as I possibly can. That’s why we’re here. That’s what men do.”[unquote] [p. 179].
This may be thought a despicable attitude, but I am not so sure. To explain why, I will detour a little into a cinematic analogy. Mention is made in this novel of the film Cinema Paradiso, Cyd offering a basic analysis of the film’s meaning. It just so happens that Giuseppe Tornatore’s masterpiece is one of my favourite films. It’s a picture that has had a profound effect on me, and this coincidence partly persuaded me to give Parsons’ novel a positive review. Eamon is a little like Toto, in that he is independent-minded, does not live his life in the patterned, somewhat predictable way that Harry and before him, Patrick, have. Instead Eamon has pursued his dreams and, while Patrick and Harry value integrity, Eamon places his stock in authenticity: he repeatedly refers back to Kilcarney, a small village in Ireland where he comes from, but at the same time, he emphasises that he is not stuck in Kilcarney, any more than Toto was stuck in his Sicilian village.
Harry is clearly frustrated with his patterned life, as is Gina underneath. The purchase of the sports car I suppose is meant to symbolise this point and also the notion that Harry is a sort of boy-man, not at that stage fully a man in the mould of his father. But it’s an unlikely plot development. Would a fairly ordinary middle-class man with an infant son really buy a sports car? I believe not. There are a number of very simple, practical reasons it’s unlikely.
As Patrick puts it:
[quote]”Completely impractical, a car like that….Nowhere for the children, is there? A man has to think of those things when he buys a motor. Or he should do.”[unquote] [p. 186].
I think most men would regard it as a waste of money, if not a guarantee of bankruptcy, but the sports car in the story is probably not intended to be believable. It’s a literary device for the reasons already explained, and it also reflects a cliché about men, though in fairness, some real people do lead clichéd lives. This author writes in clichés, and himself probably lives in clichés too. A certain type of person is susceptible to social influences and will pattern their life after popular culture and received messages in advertising, films and magazines and what have you.
I’m also not sure about the crux of the plot that has Gina suddenly want to leave for Japan and plan this as a firm and serious intention. I think it not likely that she would leave behind Harry, and - let’s not forget - her own son too, and emigrate to the other side of the world just after one fling. But she does, and within the framework of the story, Gina is taking this decision because, as she sees it, she has the right to pursue her own dreams. Harry’s brief infidelity has provided a pretext, if not a justification, for this shift in her attitude. It’s fuzzy whether her dream is really a deep desire to pursue a vocation immersed in an alien culture that she loves or a more base desire for reward and recognition and therefore not an acculturation at all. Some of the dialogue offers us a clue.
Initially Gina laments, as she sees it, the lack of respect afforded to motherhood:
[quote]”Looking after your child – it should really be the most respected job in the world. It should be worth more than going to any office. But it’s not. Do you know how many people at your f____ little television dinners and parties and launches have made me feel like nothing at all?”[unquote] [p. 56].
But is it true that mothers are or were not respected? This is really a bogus complaint, I think; an unkind person might suggest that she is subconsciously concealing a wish not to be burdened with motherhood. As if to confirm the accuracy of that suspicion, presently the author has Gina say this to Harry:
[quote]”I want my life back…..That’s all, Harry. I want my life back.” [unquote] [p. 57].
She then promptly moves to Japan, leaving behind her husband, Harry, and her son, Pat, which suggests that the real problem in such situations can be an unwillingness on the part of some women to face up to their responsibilities. By leaving for Japan and putting her career before her son, Gina was confirming that she was the one devaluing motherhood. Nobody had devalued it for her. Loyalty to her husband and the important role of bringing up her son was suddenly not as important as working for a Japanese bank. This is the paradox of conservative feminism, in that it asserts the value of women’s traditional role while at the same time encouraging women to abrogate somewhat their responsibilities as mothers, most commonly by delegating childcare to professionals.
Harry is therefore left looking after Pat, while also trying to find work to pay the mortgage and the bills, but Gina is quite unusual in this regard: women in general don’t reject motherhood so fully. Even the ambitious ones jealously guard the role – look at sites like Mumsnet, full of comfortable middle-class mothers who don’t seem to mind their biologically-ordained status. Women are in fact proud of their traditional role and, rather in the manner of 70s shop stewards looking on non-unionised employees, tend to eye single fathers suspiciously, if not with a healthy dose of contempt. In this novel, the single mothers that Harry encounters on the school run are suspicious and stand-offish towards him - he is made to feel like an “oddball” or “defective male” [p. 173] in their presence. Nevertheless, Harry soon ‘goes native’ in some respects. Mothers tend to be very judgemental about other mothers and quite opinionated in the matter of how children should be brought up, not to mention lots of other topics – see Mumsnet - and Harry picks some of this up. Parenting seems to be something that everybody thinks they are best at and everybody else is assumed to be bad at.
Is parenting an art or a science? Is it something that is handed down through the generations, intuitive and experiential, or is it scientific and potentially learnable from textbooks? I recall in school that there was a subject called Childcare Studies (or similar) taken up by girls (and a few feminine boys). Trotsky in the early years of the Soviet Union attempted to professionalise childcare, with the intention of putting children in the hands of the state. But this stuff crosses the political divide. The Nazi regime in 1930s Germany tried something similar, but with older, teenage children: the Hitler Youth. A central plank of New Labour policy was the comprehensive provision of childcare, so that women would go out and work: a policy very popular with capitalists and big business, who want women in the workforce because they are cheap and pliable. The right-winger commentator Stefan Molyneux encourages the break-up of immediate family ties. All these initiatives suggest that there is at least a belief that parenting is learnable and can be practised by non-parents with children that they have no biological connection to. But parents, whether they are good at the role or not, have the bond of blood and love their children unconditionally. Step-parents are a special case in that although they are not bonded with their children by blood, they are still family.
Harry Silver reflects on this issue in regard to Peggy, and the potential that he may be involved in her upbringing as her step-father should the relationship with her mother, Cyd, develop further. In regard to the special challenges of step-parents:
[quote]”But you can’t compete with blood.”[unquote] [p. 197].
But step-parents can learn to be good parents. Harry has to learn with Pat in any case, why not with Peggy? There is no course available to him, no preparation for day-to-day challenges of parenting, he just has to play it by ear. Therefore, parenting seems more of an art than a science, but with some definite principles that arrogant mothers would be only too ready to point out in the event that Harry slips up.
We are conditioned to believe that Harry’s is an unusual situation, but in the past – I believe up until the early 20th. century in England - the default position in a separation and marriage break-up would have been that the child stayed with the father. This made sense in a patriarchal society in which women were largely dependent on men in all respects, social and financial. The general assumption that in a parental separation the residence of the children should be with mother is a modern innovation, and if it seems intuitively correct to us today, that is only because we have been influenced to think that way. Parsons’ solicitor-character rightly points out in this novel that the law is theoretically supposed to balance the interests of the mother and father now when it comes to deciding residence rights, but one imagines in practice that things will lean heavily in the mother’s favour, due to an innate bias among chivalrous judges operating under modern, post-War cultural assumptions about the priority of the mother in the upbringing of children.
The focus on Harry’s relationship with his son and his qualities as a father obscures somewhat the relationship that I found much more interesting: between Harry and his own father, Patrick. I think it is assumed that Patrick was a terrific father – Harry certainly thinks so. Patrick, very much a man’s man, smells of Old Spice and Old Holborn, has a commando tattoo (from the War), can hold his own in a fight – but is also gentle and sentimental, especially about children - and never had to assert his authority explicitly, as it was culturally the norm in those days that the father role was respected; whereas Harry has to cope with the challenges incumbent in modernity: a time of complexity and ambiguity in the social roles of men. Patrick’s working class, Everyman interests: gambling, drinking, fighting, have become pathologised by sanitised modernity. Manhood is under attack, but Patrick just escaped this, it is Harry who got the full blast of it.
But was Patrick really a good father to Harry? I have been giving this some serious thought, and my conclusion is that, tragically, he wasn’t. Harry seems seriously maladjusted emotionally: a romantic with unrealistic ideas about relationships, something that has and is damaging him. He also seems to suffer from a need to emulate his father in order to prove he is a grown-up, a real Man, just like him. Patrick was a working class man who became a middle-class man, retaining his essential working class identity. Harry is just middle-class, and has all the mores, frustrations and concerns of a typical middle-class man from London: holidays, money, media career, childcare, etc. He suffers from deep psychic insecurity. Where did this insecurity come from? The father? He does sound like quite an overbearing character, in sharp contrast to his son. Perhaps it also stems from the upward mobility of his father. I think both his parents have also let Harry down in his emotional development. They shaped his understanding of relationships unrealistically and his father in particular should have given him information about women. Harry seems to have come away with a model of relationships from out of the 1950s, with the idea the marriage is sustained by romantic love. Some men in real-life cling to this naïve and unreformed perspective on monogamy, to the extent that they even agree to bring up other men’s children.
For Harry, the result of this is a psychologically crippling inability to pursue an authentic life and be true to himself, like Toto does in Cinema Paradiso. Just as he has a rather unhealthy insecurity about his father, Harry has a sycophantic perception of women and pedestalises them. On the legal front, he leaves himself wide open: in a real-life separation, the father, having secured de facto residence of the child in a perfectly legal and lawful manner, as Harry does in this story, would not risk this by allowing the child to stay with the mother unsupervised, as Harry then foolishly goes on to do. He trusts Gina too easily. At the very least, his solicitor would be advising against this, because Gina could just refuse to hand the child back. On the romantic front, Harry is looking for ‘the one’, which was Gina, now he thinks it’s Cyd. His love life is a series of one-woman infatuations, premised on the belief that one girl can be ‘special’ to him. This psychological crutch disarms him when dealing with women, both particularly and generally. At one point, the author has Harry in his monologue wax lyrically about single mothers as “heroes”:
[quote]”They were doing it all by themselves. Shopping, cooking, entertaining, everything. They were bringing up their children alone.”[unquote]
But they are not heroes. They are just mothers doing what they are supposed to do.
Do we tell the truth about women in our society? Why do men indulge and tolerate women in this way? Women do have affairs and cheat. Harry naively assumes they don’t. We dress women up in white at weddings, which I would assume is meant to signify virginity, but few (if any) women today marry as virgins, so in modern terms maybe the white signifies instead renewal and starting-over – or perhaps it just signifies a lie and the groom should take heed. If it’s clear that monogamy is unsustainable, then why marry?
Gina also suffers from much the same deluded notions about monogamy as Harry does. Both are trapped in their patterned existences in which they ape after clichés learned from romantic films, books, magazines and pop songs, almost as a soundtrack and motion picture depiction of their lives, all creating and fuelling unrealistic and unsustainable expectations.
At one point, Gina tells Harry:
[quote]”Of course I love you, you stupid bastard. But I’m not in love with you.”[unquote] [p. 105].
This bubble reality is only fractured when Harry selfishly buys a sports car, seeking escape from his frustration with the mundanity of ordinary manhood: the grind of going to work, paying mortgage, fixing things, etc. In the case of Gina, Harry’s infidelity provided a pretext for her to escape the mundanity of looking after their child. Thus, the break in the pattern, Harry’s sports car, set off a chain of events that unravels their sham relationship. To dissolve one’s delusions and see the world for what it is requires courage – and maybe a little cruelty – as Alfredo was cruel to Toto, the boy in Cinema Paradiso: a real example of tough love. Toto needs to let go of the little Sicilian village and his girl there in order to achieve his dreams.
However it is unclear whether Harry has understood this crucial point. For most of the story, he is still psychologically trapped within his marriage to Gina - in his mind he loves her - experiencing the sort of dissonance and frustration that has discouraged Millennials from marrying. The institution of marriage never went through a reformation to allow for changes in wider society, instead it has been smashed asunder: religiously, civically, socially, politically and economically. Harry, when considering his situation and the wider issues, continually reaches wrong conclusions: he thinks that the nuclear family is based on love, not understanding that marriage, like any other type of relationship, is an arrangement based on pragmatism, in which two people who can tolerate each other better than they can tolerate anybody else, in order to bring up a family and provide for themselves. It’s not like Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta. If a marriage works, then the romance goes – indeed, a good marriage depends on this development - and is replaced with affection and companionship. That leads to boredom and a need for escapism – as life can come to be seen as monotonous and frustrating – hence the mid-life crisis. In this novel, Harry has a sort of early mid-life crisis.
Do relationships hold us back? Relationships ought to be the basis of success and can be exactly that where two people share the same dreams, but where two people are unalike and do not have the same vision and goals, marriage can become a millstone for one or both. In Cinema Paradiso, the old man, Alfredo, believed that the village had nothing to offer Toto, nor did the girl, so he made him go away to make his way and become successful. Marrying Harry has held back Gina – she wanted to pursue her interest in another culture, Japan - but at the same time she has a child. Marriage has also possibly held back Harry. However, the message of Cinema Paradiso is not perfect either. Far from it. The film director that Toto became was quite a sad man and, although famous and successful in his chosen field, he had not achieved happiness and romantic actualisation. The solution, I believe, is a reformation of marriage as an institution, in that it should return to its purpose of providing stability in society and assuring the full independence from the state of families and private lives.
To that end, people should return to the tradition of marrying earlier in life, during their late teens, in arranged marriages. This would then provide the bedrock stability for their lives and encourage the formulation of shared goals - marriage as a partnership – at an early point before fixed ideas and plans for one’s future crystallise. Instead, marriage has become a romantic thing – based on received ideas from popular culture that have no basis in human nature – and is therefore just a plastic rite of passage that can be sloughed-off when people become bored with it, with children as an after-thought or as possessions to be fought over. Hence, far from assisting in clarifying goals, marriage holds people back. Alfredo saw that Toto had unrealistic romantic aspirations and instead needed to live his life. A similar point applies to Gina and Harry.
I am surprised at myself in giving Tony Parsons, of all people, five stars: and for a much-hyped novel at that, but there it is. Sometimes the hype is justified. I had assumed this would be fatuous rubbish, but I always review books on their own merits. There is some unctuousness in here in the author's treatment of the issues around women and children; he (or rather his character) presents a picture of somebody who is a bit drippy and too keen to please others. I also think we could have gone without most, if not all, of the foul language: the story would have very broad appeal across different age groups, including older children even, if it weren’t for the constant f-ing and blinding. I don’t accept the naturalistic argument that some authors and critics use to justify this sort of thing. Even if real people swear as much as this, in my opinion it shouldn’t be in a novel that is telling a story about ‘nice’ middle-class people. Yes it could be realistic, but when it’s put in print it distracts from the story and seems overly modish and condescending, almost as if the author is trying to affect realism when he needn’t. I think in general writers should be more careful about swearing. I am not being priggish: I don’t object to swearing when it is contextually necessary and it is done right; my objection here is on purely stylistic grounds – it’s just ugly and irritating to read, rather like listening to a pianist repeatedly hit the wrong key. It’s about knowing not just what a character might say, but also how it will be processed by the reader.
But quibbling aside, overall I am glad I read this and I did find myself sympathising with the main character, Harry Silver: which is always a sign of something that is well-written and that the author has put his heart and soul into, and this is one such case. I therefore take my hat off to Tony Parsons and thank him. Books do sometimes produce surprises: and as they say, never judge a book by its cover, which is certainly good advice. It's a very good novel, and it's not just for women. You can be a man, or even a boy, and still like this.
No comments:
Post a Comment