Memoir/My Ear at His Heart: Reading my Father by Hanif Kureishi: Around the time of India's partition, Shannoo Kureishi came from Bombay to England, writes Carlo Gébler.
He subsequently married an English woman, settled in Bromley, outside London, and worked as a clerk in the Pakistani embassy. In his spare time Shannoo wrote novels: numerous publishers rejected all of them.
For Shannoo, this failure was thrown into relief by the achievements of his older brother, Omar, the well-known Pakistani writer, and of course his son, Hanif, the successful novelist and playwright.
Shannoo died in the early 1990s. Now, Hanif Kureishi, as he approached his numinous 50th birthday, came up with a simple but utterly sublime conceit: he would read his father's unpublished books and deconstruct them using his uncle Omar's volumes of autobiography. He would describe his life with the failed writer that his father was: he would also describe how he fulfilled his father's wishes and became a writer himself. These elements he would make into a book. So he did - and what a magnificent book, both ingenious and heart-rending.
Shannoo's father, Hanif's grandfather, was a doctor in the Indian Army: his grandmother was a pious Muslim. The family lived in Poona and then Bombay where Col Kureishi, by now out of the army, was an unsuccessful businessman who liked to drink and have extra-marital affairs. Hanif Kureishi begins with An Indian Adolescence, his father's fictional account of the Bombay years. Drawing on family history and what Omar has written, he wrings from the text a picture of the man his father was before he, Hanif, knew him. This man had a sexual appetite, was a brilliant cricket player, was sympathetic to independence and had an unfulfilled relationship with a neglectful mother and a horribly competitive relationship with Omar.
From this picture of the man he never knew, Hanif Kureishi moves to the man his father became. His means of access here is a novel called The Redundant Man. From this account of a lowly immigrant's unhappy life in England, Kureishi re-encounters the Shannoo he grew up with. This man was bitter and unfulfilled. His manner was caustic and his wearisome insistence on good manners and respectful behaviour drove the youthful Hanif Kureishi mad.
But of course Hanif is older now and, with advice from Uncle Achoo Kureishi, a teacher living in the West Country, he starts to understand why his father was the way he was. He sees how Shannoo's mediocre job and his ill health and his failure to publish combined to make him a carping tyrant. And from knowing that, Kureishi is then able to understand why their relationship, with its rages and battles, was so combative.
Once the dynamics of conflict are understood, forgiveness usually follows, and the author, as we approach the end of the book, reaches a place of calm and love with regard to his father that he certainly never had when his father was alive.
And there the book could have ended. Indeed this was the author's intention. But it doesn't. There is a further twist. A third manuscript turns up. It's another version of An Indian Adolescence. It's finer than the first and was probably written many years after it. From this text his father's relationship with his mother, Hanif's grandmother, emerges. Hanif had always known it was bad. Now he finds out why.
Shannoo was the last child of Col and Mrs Kureishi. He was conceived during a holiday in a hill station where the colonel had taken his wife in order to save the marriage. The child didn't save the marriage: Mrs Kureishi wanted her husband, not another child and when she couldn't have her husband (who went on philandering and drinking) she rejected the child. For Hanif this explains Shannoo's truculent character: it also puts his literary persistence in a completely different light. Shannoo's writing, Hanif realises, not only gave his life purpose but provided a buttress behind which to shelter his battered ego. Once Hanif grasps this, his retrospective affection and respect for the old man rises to new heights.
We live in a confessional age, and memoirs are ubiquitous. This, though, is one of the most intelligent, well-structured and compelling examples of the genre that I have read in a very long time.
Carlo Gébler is writer-in-residence at HMP Maghaberry, and an author. His narrative history, The Siege of Derry, and The Bull Raid, a re-working of the Táin or The Cattle Raid of Cooley will be published next year
Heart: Reading my Father By Hanif Kureishi Faber and Faber, £12.99