Compassion for the life of Brian: Review of 'Our Father Who Wasn't There' By David Carlin, Scribe, 225pp, $32.95

Abstract

David Carlin's father shot himself, after numerous previous attempts at suicide, in January 1964 when David was six months old. He and his older brother and sister were not told the facts of his father's death for more than a decade. The two older children at least had memories of their father. David had nothing. Opening the book, his elegant, conjectural, poetic paragraphs lead to the important question: "What right do I have to tell this story?" Giving himself a memory of his father is one justification. Surely a son can tell the story of his own father? But what right, really, does any storyteller have? Carlin must bear in mind his still-living mother, who has never talked about his father's death. Not to mention his brother and sister and other close relatives. Then, in his father's psychiatric records, there is constant reference to his father's "severe conflict with his homosexual tendencies". The psychiatrists record a returning guilt - Brian, Carlin's father, ashamed of himself, feeling not good enough, "unclean", for his wife. Was he having sex with men on the side, using the beats and public places of the furtive, closeted homosexual? Should a son want to know all this about his father? And, if he knows, should he reveal it? To tell the truth or embroider? In reality, it's not an all-or-nothing situation - truth is only embroidery, after all, be it the carefully stitched words in a newspaper, or in court or medical records, or told to another as memory. How we judge the degrees of truthfulness is merely a matter of interpretation. The delight of this book is in how Carlin adjusts the perspective to help or hinder the interpretation of truth. As narrator, he is both unreliable, flying off in imagined reconstructions of what could have been, and constant - the voice strong and clear. In the main, the writing is lyrical, the only bum notes, ironically, being when Carlin writes directly about himself, as at the University of Adelaide. But he also shows himself at many different stages of his life (he's now a middle-aged man) and each of these provides a different perspective to how he might view the facts about his father. He also acknowledges that his sources can change perspectives.