I once heard it said that parents are the people to whom we keep giving just one more chance. The same, I imagine, could be said of children. Carlo Gebler's new memoir teases out this mutual and sometimes masochistic impulse. "Despite everything that had happened," he writes, "I was still determined to cling on . . . " Ernest Gebler - or Ernie, as he's here referred to - was similarly loath to let go, though he tended to describe his sons in such terms as "Idiot Irish-faced confidence tricksters".
The elder Gebler, who died in 1998, was a novelist, screenwriter, playwright and Academy Award winner. He was also a Stalinist to the end. He wrote the hugely successful novel The Plymouth Adventure, which was adapted for screen. And, for a time in the 1950s and 1960s, he was the husband of Edna O'Brien - Carlo's mother - until, as the fly-leaf tells us, her literary success eclipsed his own and Ernest convinced himself that he was the writer of her books, "a strain their relationship was unable to take". One would think so.
Though such posturing, falsifying, and self-aggrandisement were apparently par for the course where his father was concerned, Gebler is determined to avoid condemnation. In fact, it's a surprisingly fair book, given Ernie's apparently appalling behaviour. But Gebler is more interested in discerning the roots of this bitterness, in understanding rather than avenging, in giving his father one final, posthumous chance.
Redemption is alluded to early. In the opening pages, we find Carlo descending on his father's final home in Dalkey. (Ernie, suffering from Alzheimers, has gone to a nursing home.) Here, Carlo hints, is a paper trail which will eventually lead him to that longed-for understanding. Seven years - and over 300 pages - pass before Carlo brings himself to read his father's papers. A kind of reconciliation occurs, necessarily one-sided (Ernie is dead by now), but it's hard-earned and, one gets the feeling, too much wished for to be thoroughly convincing. But the desperate effort is itself a form of truth, and tells us much about the strength of that desire to cling on, regardless, and to rescue those closest to us from the ignominy of our own memories.
"Life," Nietzsche wrote, "is lived forwards, but understood backwards." Gebler cites this aphorism and uses it as something of a blueprint for his narrative. Life, as lived at the Geblers, wasn't pleasant. While a young Carlo dreamt of a father straight out of the Enid Blyton books he read, what he had was a man who taunted him with threats of the return of his better, smarter half-brother (Ernie's son by a first marriage); who referred to him - not affectionately - as "Lord Snooty"; who oversaw his sons' daily evacuations as prescribed in The Culture of Abdomen. In one blackly comic scene, his father insists Carlo learn to grown his own vegetables - potentially a lesson in nurturing, but not in the Gebler household. "If the world was ever destroyed," Ernie says, "and only you were left alive (God help us!), you couldn't survive, could you?" It's unclear whether Ernie is thinking of the nuclear threat, or just menacingly suggesting that Carlo's entire adult world might up and disappear. Whatever the case, Carlo - alas - only succeeds in raising radishes, which his father, in a cost-cutting measure, feeds him in sandwiches every day. And every day, Carlo promptly throws up.
When his parents prepare to divorce, Carlo has to choose where he'll live. Locked in his father's office, he must consign his irrevocable decision to paper. As Carlo composes his pathetically contrite statement, sealing wax bubbles ominously on the stove. The contrast between the Spartan life offered him by his father and the life of decadent consumerism provided by his mother is constantly being drawn, with young Carlo implicated in the degeneracy. "You're blinded, aren't you? Hypnotised. All you want to do is fill your belly with chocolate and get your hands on as many cheap plastic toys from Hong Kong made by slave labourers as you can."
About the only evil young Carlo isn't made to feel responsible for is the Cuban Missile Crisis, though his father does manage to make him feel characteristically stupid for not understanding it. There's a perversely gripping element to these sections of the book as we wonder what on earth Ernie will come out with next. We begin to cower, vicariously, in the face of his absurd invective. If he weren't real, he could easily slide into caricature - the emasculated bully harping on the malevolence of women and the ingratitude of children. But a certain lack of irony in Gebler's narration prevents this.
Consciously or unconsciously, Gebler has effectively left both his mother and his brother Sasha out of this story. Whether this omission is the result of a militant respect for privacies, or the reflection of an old reality still operative - in which everything, and everyone, recedes beside the towering, glowering figure of the old man - it makes for an odd, if perhaps telling, imbalance in the narrative.
In the end, we're shown excerpts from Ernie's journals. Rather than being prurient - this is a fairly reserved memoir, after all - these glimpses mostly serve to humanise the man. In 1964, Ernie records this wise dictate: "One must not let personal misfortune colour the whole world for you." Finally, here's irony, because apparently that's just what happened. To say exactly how would be to give too much away.
It's a reflection, incidentally, that follows news of a woman who - unable to live without her lover - kills herself shortly after his death. "I had never been lucky enough to meet a woman of that true nature," Ernie writes, "but still, you see, they occur in the world." Risible, yes, in its maudlin desire for an appropriately suicidal mistress, but revealing in its yearning - for the unconditional love he could neither get nor give.
Part memoir, part attempt at the rehabilitation of a father, this chronicle of an unhappy childhood, and the process of emergence from it, is perhaps inadvertently telling in its refusal to condemn. Gebler's struggle to forgive is admirable; it's also nearly as painful to witness as the lifetime of slights and insults.
Molly McCloskey is the author of Solomon's Seal, a collection of short stories