My Book Reviews

R eview of Things my mother never told me, Blake Morrison , Vintage, London, 2002 Tony Parsons, journalist and author, described this as a “must-read” book in a review in 2002.  It is still very much a must-read book in 2025.  Like Morrison’s memoir of his father, this is a masterpiece of family literature.  Since his father strode across the stage of life with great aplomb and sheer exuberance, it was obviously much easier to fill in the details of his life story.  His mother, who was also a medical doctor like her husband was, in contrast to him, so self-effacing, so taciturn that she revealed extraordinarily little about her past, and indeed not too much either about her real authentic feelings about her life to her offspring.  This, then, is a memoir in search of the elusive identity of his mother as well as a pursuit of his own identity as a very devoted and loving son.  In short, this double quest is riveting not alone because the story as it unfol...

As Hugo grows older, he grows further away from his parents as is natural.   In the  second book,  The Sailor in the Wardrobe  ( Harper Perennial , 2006) the presence of the father grows less large while that of his mother comes more to the fore, though the memoir is still dominated strongly by daddy.   A comment by Friedrich Nietzsche can serve as a marvellous backdrop to the search for the father.   It goes thus: "What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found the son the unveiled secret of the father." ( Thus Spake Zarathustra , quoted in Reclaiming Father , p. 103) There is a quotation from another German author, Hans Magnus Enzensberger on the frontispiece of The Sailor in the Wardrobe and this quotation reads: "Disconnectedness is our identity."  This is a pretty startling observation.  Obviously, our author believes that there is a lot of truth in this.  These two memoirs are about a youngster called Hugo tryin...

  Two Memoirs by Hugo Hamilton . The Speckled People (Harper Perennial, 2004)   The Sailor in the Wardrobe I reviewed And when did you last see your Father? in the previous post, a memoir in search of father, that most Freudian of archetypes.  This week, I wish to pursue the same theme in two memoirs by Hugo Hamilton (b. 1953), an Irish writer of plays, short stories, novels and memoirs.  Because two books are involved, I will spread my commentary over two posts. Perusing both memoirs by Hugo Hamilton is interesting from the point of view of the character of his father, John Hamilton .  In short, one could say on the evidence that he was very much a conflicted individual with many complexes.  Which of us is not indeed?  This post is an attempt to explore the quest for father as delineated in the first of these two impactful and moving memoirs. What makes Hugo Hamilton's memoirs so powerful is that he manages a wonderful feat, that is, he can r...

  Blake Morrison, And When Did You Last See Your Father? ( Granta, 1993 ) Blake Morrison is a widely published award-winning English poet and author who is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL).  Among his many books, he has written a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If ( Granta, 1997 ) and a memoir about his mother Things My Mother Never Told Me (Chatto & Windus, 2002). Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. And When Did You Last See Your Father?, the book reviewed here, exudes a refreshing honesty, a quality which is the hallmark of any good writing per se .   The title advances a question concerned with what we in psychotherapy call the quest for father , one of our archetypes . Early in this memoir, Morrison outlines very well his father's way of playing the game of life - This is the way it was with my father.  Minor duplicities.  Little fiddles...

  Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (O.U.P. 1999) Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams was his way of working through his personal crisis.  Ritchie Robertson , in the introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of the book, refers to Freud's " creative illness ." (p. x) Immediately before and during his writing of this book (which was first published in 1900), he was under much personal pressure.  His father had died in 1896 and Freud was overcome with grief which lasted some years.  Also, he was working extremely hard to provide for his family and the consequent worry brought on what we today call a breakdown, which he was to see as a breakthrough. Speaking of breaking through, I recall the concluding sentences of his paper on Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (1914) which runs: “This working-through of the resistances may in practice turn out to be an arduous task for the subject of the analysis and a trial of patience for th...

  Sigmund Freud Review of Freud: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 1989, 2001) Anthony Storr. This is a review I wrote some twenty years ago now.  It is a short review of a concise introduction to the subject.  The series of “very short introductions” by Oxford University Press are exceptionally succinct and wonderful introductions to a multitude of topics, with now over 750 titles in print and many more in development. This introduction to Freud is a clear account of its subject by the late English psychiatrist, Dr Anthony Storr , a much-published author in psychiatry . We have all heard of Freud no matter what subjects we have studied or no matter what professions we have pursued.  Quite simply, he has influenced contemporary culture - not just psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis - to such a large degree that most scholars recognise that he has been as influential as Albert Einstein has on modern civilization.  Freud certainly built up a deli...