Take Me Home: Parkinson's, My Father, Myself
by Jonathan Taylor
272pp, Granta, £12.99
Jonathan Taylor's father, a headmaster in Stoke-on-Trent, was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1988. Once capable of reciting most of the works of Shakespeare and naming symphonies within a couple of bars, John's memory had begun to fail him. Instead of teaching, his days were spent piling "squares" (as with his son's name, the word "cushion" was an early casualty of the disease) into precarious towers, his face set in the mask-like grimace of the Parkinsonian. As carers, his family found themselves plunged into the looking-glass world of illness, a place of bizarre accusations and terrifyingly inexplicable behaviour. John hallucinated goblins, screamed abuse, fell downstairs and attempted to throw himself from moving cars.
His father's diminishment was so painful that in the funeral eulogy, Taylor censored a favourite passage of Shakespeare "as brutally as some Stalinist apparatchik ... I didn't want to mention the 'lean and slipper'd pantaloon' with his 'shrunk shank' or the 'second childishness ... sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything'. I thought we'd had enough of oblivion." But in his own account of his father's strange life and slow death, there is no such reticence. Taylor's self-confessed failings as a carer ("I'd release my frustration and headache in a torrent of bullying blasphemy") are laid bare alongside the institutional humiliations that his father suffered, a lengthy catalogue that includes being left naked on hospital beds, abandoned in bathrooms and almost dying from dehydration.
In different hands this might be gruelling, but Taylor, an English lecturer at Loughborough University, is a spirited writer, blessed with an unusually keen sense of curiosity. When his father develops Capgras syndrome, a delusion caused by damage to the right hemisphere of the brain that leads him to confuse his son with a hated former teaching colleague, Humphrey Bogart and a giraffe, Taylor finds himself pondering: "Does it mean that racism might be a neurological syndrome ... In the ultimate irony, is it racism, not race, which is biologically based?"
This curiosity is his salvation in the bleak months that follow John's death. Finding himself "in limbo, a mental Stuck-on-Trent full of unanswered questions and phantom fathers", Taylor sets out on a quest to find out who his father really was. Even before the "neuronal holocaust" of Parkinson's, John had shrouded his origins in secrecy and silence: he might have come from the Isle of Man or Oldham, appeared to have two mothers and a fluctuating number of sisters; even his birth certificate had been falsified.
By dint of some impressive detective work, Taylor succeeds in turning up all sorts of mislaid relatives, including a first wife who repeatedly upped sticks, leaving her husband to return from work to an eerily abandoned flat. Two hitherto unmentioned children are discovered by chance, and the riddle of John's two mothers is painstakingly unpicked. Loss, it seems, was the formative experience of his father's life. "It strikes me," Taylor writes, "that fragments were all he had. How can you possess a sense of totality, of connectedness, when, in the first instance, your past is based on fracture, rather than wholeness?" It's hard not to see the latter-day dementia as an uncanny mirror of the willed amnesia with which John protected himself against the trauma of his early years.
Towards the end of his search, Taylor acquires John's medical records and begins to read them backwards, hoping to discover in a moment of "Platonic wellness" the father he has lost. Instead, the fragments that Taylor has assembled promise a tantalising coherence that never quite materialises. It is to Taylor's credit that he fails to pin down his father. Though his story is sometimes unwieldy, it also stands as a fine testimonial to a man whose life was a mystery as intriguing as it is ultimately unsolvable.
