Some rifts are irreparable

MEMOIR: CARLO GÉBLERreviews This Party's Got To Stop – A MemoirBy Rupert Thomson Granta, 263pp. £16.99

IN 1919, James Gausden, an English businessman based in Japan, married Winifred “Pim” Tolson. They had three children, Francis (1923), Cedric (1928), and Wendy (1931), and settled eventually on England’s south coast at Eastbourne in a villa James named Rokkosan after the mountains overlooking Kobe.

Wendy became a nurse and in the 1950s met Rod Thomson, an ex-Royal Navy veteran recovering from pneumonia contracted in 1943. They married, moved into Rokkosan (empty now James was dead and Pim was in a mental hospital) and had three children: Rupert (the author), Robin and Ralph.

In July 1964, Rupert’s mother died playing tennis. It was the founding calamity of his life. He went on to public school and Cambridge. After graduation he worked for a London ad agency. Meanwhile, his brother Ralph, at London University, fell for fellow student Vivian.

When Rupert first knew them as a couple he himself was with Tina, an aspiring artist, and the brothers and their girlfriends socialised constantly. “But then, almost overnight, Ralph and Vivian stopped calling, and the next time they moved they didn’t give us their address.” Tina feared she’d been “indiscreet about Ralph’s past and that Vivian might have taken offence”.

In 1981, Rupert and Tina split and Ralph asked Rupert to be best man at his and Vivian’s wedding. Rupert declined. They’d fallen out of touch, he said sniffily. A rift opened, with him and Robin on one side, Ralph and Vivian on the other.

The author’s father died in 1984, and Rupert, Robin, Ralph and Vivian moved into Rokkosan. After months of tension and rows about the disposal of assets, the house was cleared and sold; then the brothers scattered.

Three years on and not having seen Ralph since, Rupert needed his signature for probate: he located Ralph at the City branch of an Italian bank: at the end of the call Ralph told Rupert not to ring him again but in future to write if he wanted to make contact.

For the next 20 years there was no communication of any kind whatsoever, until, early in 2006, Rupert finally wrote Ralph a letter. Ralph replied. A correspondence followed and in December 2007, Rupert went out to Shanghai (where Ralph was a banker) to see him.

Over several meals the brothers explored their rupture. Tina was right; she had started it. However, the cause wasn’t an indiscretion but an insult delivered one day when she’d said “she really wanted to paint Vivian because it was always much more interesting to paint people who weren’t beautiful”. Everything that followed (Rupert’s refusal to be best man, the arguments during the months everyone lived in Rokkosan), only served to deepen and broaden the split. Talking in Shanghai the brothers closed the gap but Vivian remained unforgiving. She wouldn’t see Rupert when he was in China, or have him to her home.

Thomson tells his story brilliantly. His language is clear, his dialogue flawless and his evocation of political and social context fastidiously accurate. He is also wonderfully responsive to the physical world (urban as well as rural) and his painterly descriptions of place created wonderful pictures in my mind as I read. However, for me, the most arresting feature of this memoir isn’t the technique (exemplary though that is) but its brutal candour.

With the exception of his father-in-law (who’s dead) he spares no one. In his account Tina (though only a minor character she’s important because she starts the feud) is tactless and inconsiderate. His father is obtuse, annoying and dull. Robin is bumptious. Ralph is a coward: craven, wrong-headed, and unable to stand up to his wife. Vivian is controlling and monstrous.

However, the person who comes off worst of all is Rupert himself, (a good defence this, of course, against attack from those he’s written about so fiercely here): in his own account he’s thoughtless and glib, shallow and callous.

As a greedy reader who longs to know everything, I’m grateful for Thomson’s frankness even as, in another part of my psyche, I am anxious about his family’s likely reaction to his book’s incendiary content. I can’t imagine they’ll like it. I’m also, quite separately from my enjoyment of Thomson’s truth telling, intensely grateful for the assault he mounts here on one of our most cherished current pieties.

We live in a culture that insists that there is no enmity that isn’t amenable to resolution, and that everyone can forgive and move on. No, says Thomson, some chasms (such as that between him and Vivian) are unbridgeable, while others, such as that between him and Ralph, while they can be repaired can never be permanently removed. They will always be there, a shadow on relations.

It takes courage to write against our cultural insistence on reconciliation though there will be those who feel Thomson’s conclusion offers no hope and leaves readers in a bleak place. It does, but literature’s primary function is not to console; literature’s primary function is to try to tell truth and in this case the truth that is told is that modernity’s tyrannical cheery optimism and its refusal to accept there’s such a thing as failure is bogus, a lie. And though we may not like to be told some breaks can’t be fixed, at least Thomson has put this inside a beautifully made literary artifact and thank goodness: beauty here really does sugar his pill.

Carlo Gébler is the Royal Literary Fund fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast and is currently writing a memoir about working on Grub Street

Rupert Thomson will read, with writer Pat Boran, in the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, on Friday April 23 at 1pm during Cúirt International Festival of Literature. Thompson will also take part in the Granta at Cuirt event on The Rise of the Memoirin the Town Hall Theatre on Thursday April 22 at 1pm