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The three daughters and their half-brother, the narrator of the story, grow up under the nervy, superstitious care of their mother and the second ‘Justin’, a quixotic, violent, but sporadically appealing man who attempts to solve his own inadequacies through a vigilant adherence to anthroposophy. The combination of this and a wartime spent in fear and deprivation takes an inevitable toll on the children.
One of the strengths of the book is that none of the characters is especially likeable: the mother is susceptible and weak, the step-father a pettily cruel fabulist; the two elder daughters suffer from terminal illnesses which are no less virulent for being partly psychosomatic and no less alienating for being fatal; the youngest daughter, an artist manqué, becomes a nurse and tends her middle sibling’s death in a deeply controlling but entirely believable way, which reflects her patient’s own controlling impulses, a legacy of the childhood internment; the eldest daughter, who has escaped to Canada with a Chinese husband — partly, we gather, to evade her step-father’s unwelcome attentions — is also a cancer patient, while their half-brother, now a middle-aged loner, disabled both from intimacy and detachment by a fascinated loathing of his father, wonders whether to adopt his nephew to save him from the deficiencies of his own benighted father.
All this sounds like a solemn Dutch Cold Comfort Farm. In fact, it is an impressive, if bleak, book, partly because the contrariness of real-life relationships is so well conveyed. The son’s uncovering of the complex reality of his father — his years in an orphanage, a consequence of a vain mother’s indifference, his shame at the ‘touch of the tar brush’ in his genetic make-up, his humiliation by his peers, his failure to rise above the mediocre in his army career, his deception at the hands of his own family, his misguided efforts to ‘educate’ his son beyond his own achievements — is painful because it involves a surrender of carefully nurtured resentment, and resentment is a useful ballast for survival. At one point, he is told that ‘it is possible to raise the dead with tears’; the novel sombrely charts the penalties of forgiveness and provides no false consolations.
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