Memoir: The father of the Scottish poet, John Burnside, the author of this heartbreaking memoir, was born illegitimate in 1926 and reared by relatives for whom "cruelty was an ideology".
His carers decanted into him that version of Scottish working-class masculinity that only permits self-expression through alcohol or violence. They taught him that love, either the love of others or of the self, had no value and that drinking or fighting were the only proper activities for men.
The young child to whom these values were given was damaged and desperate. He knew he was not wanted and had never been wanted. He knew, too, because his carers had taken care to tell him, that he had no talents and was destined for failure. With his temperament and the values he was given it was hardly surprising, when he emerged into manhood, that he was an inveterate liar and an amateur criminal with only two coping strategies in his repertoire: boozing and brawling. For someone as psychologically hobbled as he was, these were about the worst ones going.
In the early 1950s Burnside snr did his National Service, and then married the author's saintly mother, a miner's daughter and a Catholic. She was a catch, being higher up the social scale than he, who was a mere common labourer. Naturally, the in-laws. recognising a monster, never welcomed him, which compounded his insecurity and made him still more vicious.
In the early years of the marriage, in Cowdenbeath, a dour Scottish pit village, the writer's hard-drinking father controlled his wife and two children by threatening violence. His nurturing, naturally, replicated his own brutal experience. For instance, he told the author at the age of four to jump from the kitchen table, promising to catch him. He didn't, the author hit the floor, and the moral swiftly followed: "Never trust nae bastard," as he put it. On another occasion, finding his son's beloved teddy in the living room when he came in drunk, he burnt the thing in the fire in order to teach his son to put his things away.
When the author was 10 the family moved to Corby, where his father worked in the steel works and they lived in a grim council house. Burnside snr, who had more money and so could drink more, started getting physical in the home, at least with his wife and daughter. Terrible nights were now frequent in the Burnside household, followed by gruesome mornings of "remorse and sweet tea". The author, who was clever, contemptuous and disgusted, took to locking himself in his room. He took a lot of narcotics, grass and LSD.
By early manhood John Burnside hated his father. One night he went out to kill him as he came home from the pub. He only didn't because his father had a pal with him. After this he realised he couldn't stay at home and fled. Once his mother died, communication with his father ceased almost entirely except for brief anodyne exchanges at family gatherings.
However, though there was now no contact, they were leading identical lives. They both had the same incapacity: neither could love. And they were both falling, by which the author means they were both killing themselves - the father with drink, the son with drink and barbiturates.
INEVITABLY, IN LATE middle age, Burnside snr suffered a succession of heart attacks. The fourth, as he stood at the cigarette machine in the Silver Band Club in Corby killed him. In the case of his son, younger and physically stronger, it wasn't the body that broke; it was the mind. He had breakdowns and psychotic episodes and two lengthy spells in Fulbourn, the Cambridgeshire mental hospital. He also fell in love with a woman with an aptitude for S&M who tried to murder him. He emerged from these experiences exhausted with himself, his madness, and his self-destructive binges, just in time to bury his father.
The author is now a father himself, with two sons. Having come through what he has, he knows how vital in the life of a child a father's influence is. He knows it is incumbent on the father that he try to be the living embodiment of the ideal that every child carries in his or her heart, even if he fails to live up to that ideal. He knows, too, that his father was not a bad man but a damaged one. He also knows he was as much to blame for the calamitous breakdown of their relationship as his father was.
The author's understanding was hard won. In A Lie About My Father he tells us what he went through to get there. His candid account has real literary merit. The language is precise, the narrative is rich, his eye is unflinching. However, besides it's literary excellence, it is also a book to inspire hope: for it shows how, from the most dire circumstances, it is possible to wring, not only art, as he has, but real understanding and forgiveness and thus to transcend misery and hurt.
A Lie about My Father By John Burnside, Jonathan Cape, 325pp. £12.99
Carlo Gébler is currently Arts Council of Ireland Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. The paperback edition of his The Siege of Derry: A History is out now