This is a curiosity, a classy (if not class-bound) recasting of the "misery memoir" which scrupulously removes the wallowing but doesn't bring in anything to replace it. The misery in the memoir affects William's older brother, Richard, who, after an ear infection in childhood, becomes epileptic. When he suffers "status epilepticus" as a schoolboy - either a chain of fits or a single long seizure - his brain is scarred and his behaviour distorted.
Richard is a figure of great pathos, trapped in an indefinite adolescence (his behaviour strongly shaped by how his football team, Leeds United, is playing from week to week), but also seemingly bumped up a generation by the rigidity of his mental habits, the stiff conversational formulas relieved by puns, the pipe-smoker's rituals.
The rest of the family carries on with a composure that would be wildly abnormal anywhere on earth except among the English upper class. Richard takes a cast-iron pan from the hob and holds it against Mum's cheek. She wears a headscarf the next morning on the school run. These things happen. Richard goes berserk and smashes windows with an iron pole. Dad doesn't raise his voice or curse God. His only heightened response to the continuing family crisis is to rest his hand against a buttress, "asking the house for some of its strength".
William Fiennes is a considerable prose stylist, an exquisite describer, but he seems to fight against the emotional directness required by a book of this sort. It's true that, being the youngest of the family (11 years Richard's junior), he wasn't constantly measuring his brother against an unimpaired image of him. But when his mother was giving him a bath, and locked the door against an aggressively prowling Richard, he knew perfectly well this wasn't a game. It's just that he chooses to remember actions ("I know he's put his shoulder to [the door] because the whole thing warps inward off the bolt, and then the bathroom fills with a series of splintery booms as he kicks in the bottom plywood panels") rather than the feelings which must have accompanied them. A therapist might see something traumatised about the combination in these memories of visual clarity and emotional blankness.
A stiff upper lip is a hard thing to anatomise. You could put it down straightforwardly to the family style, except that publicising private heartbreak is so far from the family style. The educational aspect (raising awareness of a little-understood condition) is presumably what has overcome any clan reluctance, and certainly Fiennes gives a compressed history of neurology in counterpoint to his narrative, but the tone is impassive and almost academic.
Perhaps the self-suppression is particular to the author and represents the conviction that he isn't entitled, with his fully functioning brain, to lodge any complaints against life. At one point, he contrasts Richard's disordered impulses with his own "intentional" moods. This is being rather fierce on himself, since surely our moods affect our will at least as much as the other way round.
What complaints might he have? Well, if there is a single social structure which prizes a first-born son over any aftercomers, it is the aristocratic family, landed and titled. The traditional assigning of status is very much first-past-the-post rather than proportional representation, though "Dad" and "Mum" (Lord and Lady Saye) are too obliquely characterised for the reader to make a judgment. When they're not taking part in painful tableaux with poor Richard, they stay behind a velvet rope.
Still, they were traditional enough to send William to boarding school at eight, about which he says simply: "I didn't mind." That stoical phrase could do with some unpacking. It would be helpful to know whether his childhood before boarding school was happy or unhappy, but there are few clues. Growing up solitary in a grand house can be a privileged limbo. (The house is Broughton Castle, screen home of Gwyneth Paltrow's character in Shakespeare in Love.) There was plenty for William to see as a boy - Mum refreshing the rush matting in the King's Chamber with a watering can (as if it was a lawn that had come indoors), brown-painted Rice Krispies being applied to an actor's face to serve as Cromwell's warts - but no one to share the sights with. There were other siblings, the twins Martin and Susannah, but they were much nearer Richard's age, almost a decade older than him, and virtual absentees from the book.
There are paradoxes about his family situation which he doesn't go into. Of all the Fiennes children, he is the only one to have lived his whole early life in the house (his paternal grandparents having died not long before he was born), but is low on the list of its possible heirs. The house has a deeper claim on him than he has on it.
Among the treasured objects in the house were photographs of William's brother Thomas, born five years before him but killed in an accident aged about three. William would visit Thomas's grave and wonder "what it would be like if he were here to ride a bike with me along the single-track road to Fulling Mill and Broughton Grounds". At some stage it must have occurred to him that if Thomas had lived, he, too, might be bicycling alone, without a William beside him.
Only one passage acknowledges a complex interplay between the living brothers: William Fiennes admits that "something mean deep inside" him savoured the tension caused by Richard's bad behaviour, excited by the feeling of things being on a knife edge. It's as if Richard was an involuntary, neurological rebel, venting the destructive impulses which others may feel but know they must suppress, all the hidden costs of fitting in.
One of the ways William Fiennes explored his environment as a child was swimming in the castle moat. The water was only warm near the surface, so he would try to splash as little as possible and he worried that pike would nip at his feet if he put them down. But didn't this project need a less tentative approach? A family historian must be willing to stir up the cold water, pike or no pike.
