The Good Father by Liam McIlvanney

This verse from Childhood by Edwin Muir paints an image of calm, a child peacefully lying amongst rocks while the grasses protect him from the shadows as they bend and sway in the wind. A perhaps simplistic interpretation of this piece from Muir’s poem but one that I could not shake from my mind when I read The Good Father by Liam McIlvanney. For some reason Muir’s Childhood and his other poem, The Labyrinth, stuck in my mind! Why? Well it is entirely possible that I have been ensconced in Muir Land for too long as I try to write my MPhil dissertation but bear with me.

The Good Father is a tale of secrets and life, carefully constructed around the Rutherford family. Like the locations, each of McIlvanney’s characters have a distinct familiarity to them, and not only because Gordon Rutherford is a Professor of Scottish Literature at University of Glasgow. (The Confessions of a Justified Sinner lecture, brought back many memories). I have known a Sarah, an Alan and many more of those who become threads through McIlvanney’s cleverly woven tale set on the west coast of Scotland. I am not going into the plot in any detail so if you want spoilers then sorry, you won’t find them here.

The cover of The Good Father hints at what is at the core of the novel, ‘when a child disappears, no secret is safe’, so the rawness of emotions, the panic, the blame around a missing child is thrown in your face by the narrator from the very beginning. But for me, the axis of this novel around which the plot spins, is those questions that are asked in these emotionally, charged situations and especially those questions that secrets often ask, or demand, of us.

Why are we keeping them?

What power do secrets hold for, and over, us?

What will we do to prevent those secrets from becoming a powerful weapon in someone else’s hands?

McIlvanney holds these thoughts over our heads as we read and discover that we are unwitting witnesses to a situation that is the stuff of nightmares. As a said witness I found myself like a deer in the headlights, totally transfixed by the plot but not wanting to move on for fear of what might come next. And this is where the skill of a writer comes in, I don’t want to know the gory details, I don’t want to read what I think is inevitable but by the time Rutherford had sunk his next whisky, I am already another three chapters in.

The Good Father is thrilling, disturbing and challenging! But it is worth it! It demonstrates forms of power through secrets and without giving too much away it also demonstrates the strength and survival of a family. There is strange background of normality to the novel, in the school runs, the supermarket shop, the pub quiz but where these everyday situations should provide a moment of tediousness of the norm, a secret is right round the corner to knock the safety of the familiar out of the shopping basket.

This is a book worth reading! I am not a parent and I have no doubt that those with these responsibilities will read it differently from me but, as I said at its core is not just the what would you do to protect your children, but also what would we do to cover the secrets that surround our actions and/or inaction?

But back to Muir’s Childhood! The last line ‘And from the house his mother called his name’ will make sense once you have read the novel, but as a hint, although the Good Father narrates the story, there is always a Good Mother peeling carrots at the sink.