Fragmented memories of a dad

Memoir:Parkinson's disease, remarks Jonathan Taylor in this fractured, affecting and erudite memoir, is "all about repetition, and the repetition of repetition". In the case of the author's father, the "shaking palsy" first described by James Parkinson in 1817 was accompanied by a progressive dementia that cast the patient adrift on a tide of unanswerable questions.

"Who are you?", "Where are you taking me?", and, worst of all, "What have you done with my son?". As he tries to channel the memories of his father's decline into something like a coherent story, Taylor finds that he has to write "an impossible, Parkinsonian kind of history, where breezes, fluttering fingers . . . and minute changes in medication are of the utmost importance".

Storytelling must mirror, somehow, the relentless erosion of all narrative sense.

TAYLOR WRITES WITH an awful clarity about the details of that collapse: from his father's first pratfalls of memory - suddenly forgetting his young daughter's name - to the physical indignities and raging paranoia that marred his last years. But he is startlingly acute, too, on the strange voids that open around the adolescent child of a dying parent: the willed ignorance by which one tries to stave off knowledge of the worst. Suffering from his own "dementia of youth", Taylor failed to notice his father's nervous breakdown and reclusive retirement. Even as the first symptoms of Parkinson's encroached and a siege-state of daily care and vigilance settled on the family, he managed for years to blank the truth about how the story would end. "When", he asks in retrospect, "did I know what I know now?"

At its most arresting, Take Me Home is a study in the dissolution of the sense of time that accompanies intractable illness. For Taylor's father, airlocked in anxiety and pain, "everything is happening now, nothing is in the past". But the same is true for his adult son, who now regards those years as a collage of frozen moments: everything seems to cohere, paradoxically, around the motif of forgetting, as if the disease were a malign metaphor that has infected past, present and future. Taylor discovers that his father was adopted after his own mother's death, that he had been married before and suppressed the memory of a son and daughter, that he had hidden a lifetime of leaving people behind. Parkinson's, appallingly, starts to seem like his destiny, like the palsied embodiment of ingrained habit.

In a sense, the family drama that Taylor restages is unexceptional, and he sometimes struggles to find the right correlative to make it convince as a memoir. It's a perennial problem of the genre: how to match style and structure to the author's accurate sense of the unruliness of memory, made the more daunting here by his very insight into the symbolic scope - "an unstill stillness, an unmoving motion" - of his father's disease. At times, the book resorts to a kind of sympathetic magic, by which every detail can apparently be suborned to a vague thesis about individual and collective memory, and even about history itself. This method can end in bathos, as when Taylor avers, of a family friend whose mother died in the Holocaust, that his own parents' first meeting at a railway station "is distantly linked to the end of the line that is Auschwitz".

What works, in other words, at the level of assertion often fails to translate, in formal terms, into the kind of tellingly fragmented memoir that Taylor wants to write. He is, for sure, frequently blackly comic: he recalls as a teenager telling a nosy passerby that he was kidnapping the frail old man he was frogmarching about. But there are some odd lapses. One doesn't begrudge the author his adult contentment, but a whole chapter on how he met his future wife at a train station seems ill-judged, as do a couple of tweedy asides about how contemporary critics simply don't love literature as much as his father taught him to.

TOWARDS THE END of the book, however, Taylor finds exactly the right structural equivalent to his father's story and his own efforts to piece it together. He starts to read the medical records that recount the onset of tremors, depression and ill-defined unease. The doctors' notes record his father's slump into ill-health with less than clinical detachment, remarking his character ("a very pleasant gentleman") and even social status ("lives with his wife in a house"). Except: Taylor reads the documents backwards, so that the shambling, incontinent and angry figure in his memory is gradually transformed into a man lucidly aware of his predicament and finally into a functioning but worried individual. It's a fittingly restorative end to a book that opens with an epigraph from Thomas De Quincey: "there is no such thing as forgetting".

Brian Dillon is an editor of Cabinet, a quarterly of art and culture. He is author of a memoir, In the Dark Room, and is working on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives

Take Me Home: Parkinson's, My Father, Myself By Jonathan Taylor Granta, 274pp. £12.99