Fathers in Fiction

That line was echoed by Jack Torrence in The Shining by Stephen King. Torrance was a downright deranged loon. He was a belligerent alcoholic writer who lived with his wife Wendy and son Danny, who wields a special psychic power known as “the shining”. Eventually, Jack gets possessed by the demonic spirit and tries to kill his own family. After bashing down the bathroom to attack his wife, he chased his son with a croquet mallet. Eventually, he died which might have been the nicest thing he did for his son. That was not before breaking his Danny’s hand in a fit of alcoholic rage, and tackling other demons while spewing out lines such as “Am not going to hurt you, I just want to smash your brains in”. Blame it on Jack’s troubled past as a victim of an abusive alcoholic father, or on the vicious energy of the hotel he is hired to manage that magnifies his demons. 

The Shining is a disturbing book, which was thought to be partly autobiographical of King’s life. But what makes reading it so engaging — yet scary — is the brilliantly weird father-son relationship between Jack and Danny, which throws away all accounts of normalcy out of the window. 

But isn’t that the beauty of fiction. That it allows you to turn fathers or filial figures into murderers, lovers, criminals, thieves, benefactors, badass bisexual beasts or just regular everyday heroes. No matter their nature — as beacons of domesticity or as vicious blood-sucking demons; as main characters or as the ensemble cast serving as pivotal wallflowers to the plot, daddies and their issues (quite literally)  are an instant page-turner. Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is a great example of a good dad. He used sarcasm and a strong dose of wryness to get through his life as the long suffering husband of Mrs Bennet and as the father of opinionated gaggle of five unmarried daughters. Examples of wholesome organically good dads are plentiful in fiction. In complete contrast to King’s Torrance are Charles Dickens’paternal figures in Great Expectations. Pip, the narrator, trails along a journey where he ends up with two father figures. In clever Dickensian manner, each of these figures offers something the other doesn’t to compensate for the absence of a real father. There’s Pip’s brother-in-law, Joe Gargery who raises him as a son and his benefactor, Abel Magwitch who makes him into a gentleman of the world. A similar relationship is observed between Theo Decker and James Hobart in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. When Theo’s mother dies in an explosion in the museum and his wastrel alcoholic father is nowhere to be found, Theo ends up with a charming old furniture restorer called Hobie who comforts and cajoles him as his own. 

There are dads that fall somewhere on the periphery of the “in-between” category that make them somewhat good-ish examples. There is Franklin Plaskett in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin. As a father, Franklin indulges Kevin a little too much. Neither will he discipline him nor acknowledge that he has a problem. And so he is severely punished for his ineffectual parenting. Another interesting kinda-sorta-not really father figure-ish relationship occurs in Nick Hornby’s fabulous coming-of-age novel, About A Boy. Will Freeman is a 38-year-old kidult slacker who lives off the substantial royalties acquired by a Christmas hit song his father wrote, and Marcus is a socially inept 12-year-old who navigates life with his depressive and suicidal mother. The book smartly explores the fear of fatherhood and the responsibility that comes with being a role model.

Then there’s the 57-year-old hypochondriac dad George Hall in Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother. He doesn’t quite fit in any box but is an interesting character as a father.I think what makes him a relatively half decent candidate for a good dad is this: George discovers a lesion on his hip which he instantly diagnoses as cancer — but doesn’t want to bother anyone with this. So as dementia creeps in on George, Haddon paints an amusing (yet troubling portrait) of a dignified man trying to go insane politely without annoying his children with his woes.

But frankly, I like to read about dysfunctional dads. Maybe it is just a voyeuristic thrill of reading someone who is a little out of the ordinary. I mean — don’t we all prefer them a little psychotic, neurotic or at least with some sort of a facial tic (in the least)? It was this streak of insanity that I found attractive to explore in my novel as well. The idea stemmed from a glimmer of thought: what if someone was a perennially intoxicated bisexual beast who wasn’t quite cut out for fatherhood.Then what happens? How do you navigate a life being a daughter of a Wildean dandy, half man, half sex machine who steals your lover?

In fiction, there are plentiful examples fathers (and mothers) who disappoint with their cruel intentions, betray, abuse and destroy their children’s life. How can we forget the 38-year-old European professor, Humbert Humbert who was convinced that his step-daughter could also be his lover? Filial themes take on a loftier theme in King Lear where Shakespeare takes the roles of parent-child relationships and turns them asunder. Lear challenges his daughters to prove which of them loves him best to help him divide his kingdom ably.Two of his daughters, Goneril and Regan, play along in the game while his favourite daughter, Cordelia, refuses to indulge his vanity and so is banished. Everything ends tragically and Lear is left alone clutching the fallen figure of Cordelia in his arms.

However, sometimes the most violent of characters stems, sadly enough, from real life. In his bone-chilling autobiographical novel Never Mind, the author Edward St. Aubyn portrays an aristocratic sadist who repeatedly raped his wife and son. Based on his father, it was too true to be any good — least of all for young St Aubyn. Yet, he survived to write this story — and its sequels — because that’s what saved him in the end.