Our Fathers - Hardcover

O'Hagan, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571195024 ISBN 13: 9780571195022

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1999

Synopsis

The theme of this Scottish Catholic novel is the collision of the old Scotland of municipal socialism and the new. That collision is dramatized in the story of the narrator's grandfather, an ambitious but misguided social improver.

About this title

Review:

In his acclaimed debut The Missing, Andrew O'Hagan explored our dysfunctional society of inarticulate loners, drawing on his own family. Our Fathers goes the crucial step further, doing the same work but in unabashed novelistic form and it's just as successful, just as shattering in its direct honesty.

Jamie Bawn returns from life in Liverpudlian exile to his home "valleys of mirth" in Ayrshire. He's brought back by his grandfather Hugh, nearing the end of his life high in a 24-storey tower block that once reached for the sky, but now plumbs the depths. Faced with Hugh's decline, Jamie comes to terms with his own father, one of those Scottish fathers "made for grief", whose children ran from them and endemic, proud self-pity: "Our fathers were all poor, poorer than our fathers' fathers."

The elements of soap opera are all alarmingly present and correct--alcoholic father, masochistic mother--but O'Hagan never plays to the gallery: there's a warmth tempering his deliberate unsentimentality, reminiscent of the best cinematic work of Terence Davies. This is a book about lost dreams--not just of the Bawn family, but of the generations that put their trust in socialist solutions, in public housing, in ideas. A succinct, perfectly judged and ultimately moving debut. --Alan Stewart

Review:

"By any standards, Our Fathers is a powerful novel. As a first novel, it is very remarkable indeed."-The Independent "O'Hagan makes the heavy light, the ugly near to lovely through an unusual combination of language, poetic in its imagery on the one hand and ruthlessly sharp and contemporary in idiom on the other."-The Spectator "I have scarcely read so silvery beautiful a style when it comes to the Scots landscape, nor one so tender about matters of life and death."-Financial Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0571195024
• ISBN 13: 9780571195022
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224