In this not-quite-a-memoir, the novelist Sebastian Faulks gives a fine-grained account of growing up in post-second world war England. In the home counties cottage he shares with his parents and older brother, olive oil does duty not in the kitchen but as a bathroom remedy for bunged-up ears. If you are lucky enough to have a telephone (the Faulks are), it will probably be a “party” line shared with the people next door. Holidays consist of an icy week in Bexhill-on-Sea or, a step up, the Isle of Wight (just as cold but with a nicer class of ice-cream). Then there are all those tight-lipped middle-aged men busying themselves mowing the lawn and going to work in mysterious “offices”. Not so long ago they were shooting down Germans or trying to survive the north African desert.
Faulks’s own father is one of these heroes in hiding – a provincial solicitor in a failing practice who won the Military Cross for service in Tunisia. Another is Commander Sanderson, the headteacher of the prep school to which Faulks is dispatched at the age of eight. It is impossible not to feel freshly affronted by a system that routinely sent privileged boys away from home in order to make a certain kind of man of them. No surprise either that at this point Faulks retreats into the third person, as if the obscenity is still too raw to tell directly. “A hopeful, credulous little boy is being unpicked and discontinued. He’s like a creature in a science-fiction story that’s been sent back to have its factory settings altered.”
Initially, it looks as though Faulks has emerged unscathed: he becomes head boy, wins scholarships to Wellington and then on to Cambridge. But something happens in his second year at university. Exactly what isn’t clear because, once again, he retreats into grammatical obscurity: “There were meetings with doctors, pills … panic attacks, agoraphobia, white nights of insomnia.” The only thing that helps him is listening on repeat to Procol Harum’s Fires (Which Burnt Brightly), a keening lament for youthful idealism.
The rest of the book proceeds in this same puzzling way, hinting at depths that fail to take on a discernible shape. Instead, Faulks drops clues – for himself perhaps as much as for us – by recounting those many moments in life when he has found himself ambushed by grief. Sitting in the archives at the Imperial War Museum, researching the western front for the book that will become Birdsong, he stuffs a handkerchief in his mouth to stop himself from sobbing. Another time, reading from the novel in a Chicago bookshop, he breaks down completely, taking the audience with him. Later, this time on a plane and with no one looking, he tears up at Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières’ account of the Italian occupation of Cephalonia during the second world war.
Frustratingly, Faulks doesn’t identify what exactly is being catalysed in him by these stories of catastrophic loss. Is it the realisation that it was young men like him who bore the brunt of industrialised warfare in the 20th century? Or does the trauma press more directly on the psychological wounds that opened up with that annihilation at the age of eight? Or perhaps another kind of generational trauma is in play: only at the very end of the book does Faulks reveal his beloved mother’s own terrible early years at the hands of an erratic father (a Somme survivor) and an alcoholic stepmother who treated her with “appalling cruelty”.
In his foreword, Faulks warns that this is going to be a “mongrel” book. It started life as a series of “essays on the things that had meant the most to me” during a career that stretched back to the raffish Fleet Street of the 1970s. Faulks’s publishers, though, had other ideas, and asked him to scrap the “least autobiographical” parts and rearrange the remainder in a chronological sequence. The result is a text that reads like a tussle, with Faulks steering away from anything that reads as memoir, while an unseen editorial hand shoves him just as firmly towards it.
• Fires Which Burned Brightly: A Life in Progress by Sebastian Faulks is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
