21 APRIL 2007, Page 44

Veiled in mystery

Helena Drysdale

FAMILY ROMANCE by John Lanchester Faber, £16.99, pp. 394, ISBN 9780571234400 ✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 In my capacity as editor for a writers’ editorial agency, I seem to have cornered the market in memoirs. In the last few months I have been immersed successively in the underworlds of a crack addict, a borstal boy, a prison governor, an obsessive-compulsive anorexic, and a con man.

I can’t get enough of these peeks into the backstages of people’s lives, and nor, it seems, can the general public. In a recent Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller list, nine of the top ten are memoirs, some by ‘celebrities’, and others of the more intriguing ‘misery’ genre with titles like Ugly or Fatso. Other recent memoirs such as Brian Thompson’s Keeping Mum, or Jeremy Harding’s Mother Country, are as dramatic and well-plotted as a novel, but have the added frisson of being true.

Family Romance is one of these. After John Lanchester’s parents died, he made some surprising discoveries. He learnt that his mother was nine years older than she claimed, that her name on her passport was not her real name, and that for 15 years she had been a nun. He sets out to unravel these mysteries. The result is not only an intriguing detective story, but also an intimate examination of a family stymied by secrets. Although there is some unhappiness, common to most families, this is not a misery memoir; there are no shocking tales of physical abuse or self-pity. Instead it is an almost forensic inquiry into the motivations that drove his mother to act as she did, and the effects her actions had on her and her relatives.

Julia Gunnigan was the eldest of eight children brought up on a poverty-stricken farm in Mayo, Ireland in the 1920s and 30s. She was bright, but there was no money for the girls, and a shortage of husbands willing to marry them. The church seemed a safe bet, not only because it provided security, but also because of the huge status it conferred on the family. So Julia became a postulant nun. Her parents were inordinately proud, and on her rare home visits, swathed in habit and veil, they showed her off to neighbours and relatives. For the first time she felt loved and admired. But when at the eleventh hour she decided not to take her vows, her parents were so mortified that they cut her out of their lives. She became a nonperson.

She duly returned to a convent and spent the next 14 years as a missionary nun in India. Eventually she accepted that this restricted, oppressive world was not for her, and she broke away again.

All this comes as a posthumous revelation to her son, to whom she had never breathed a word of her story, but he pieces it together brilliantly. He is particularly good on the trauma of her escape from her 14-year seclusion, and the material details that obsessed her as she prepared, secretly, to face the outside world. Where could she get hold of a bra and corset? How could she let her hair grow in time to reveal it to the world? What were current fashionable hairstyles?

Although Julia dominates the story, Lanchester is also interesting on the lives of his father’s parents, who were interned during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. In 1940 Bill, their 14-year-old only child, was evacuated to Melbourne, where he had to make a new life for himself alone, ignorant of whether or not his parents were still alive.

When the newly secular Julia, now in her late thirties, falls in love with Bill and discovers his longing for children, she seizes her chance of happiness, steals her younger sister’s birth certificate and lies about her age in order to make her childbearing prospects more promising.

In delving into his parents’ mindset, Lanchester grasps each choice that they made, examines it thoughtfully from every side, then lists the reasons for it, and its outcomes. His careful prose is clever and often witty, but don’t expect any Irish flights of poetry. While not shy of regaling us with his academic, sporting and literary successes, he comes across as someone who has been almost as emotionally tight-lipped as his parents. This enthralling book is his way of understanding why, and perhaps of overcoming it.

Helena Drysdale’s latest book, Strangerland: A Family at War, is published by Picador at £8.99.