Swan River: A Family Memoir

David Reynolds

368pp, Picador, £15.99

Once past the age of infancy, most of us find our parents boring, and their parents more boring still. If they reminisce, we switch off, unwilling to believe that these niggling oldsters might ever have been young, done things, gone places, defied convention, taken risks. Only when they're dead or geriatric do their earlier lives, before we existed, begin to seem interesting. Until then, we're too preoccupied with our own.

As a child, David Reynolds wasn't like the rest of us. He listened to relatives, asked questions, took notes, read his grandmother's diaries and even succeeded in getting his friend Deborah interested too. Other boys played football and puffed cigarettes; he did the same, but in private pursued his hobby, rattling family skeletons. Perhaps it helped that he was an only child, whose parents were already old when they had him (his father 56, his mother 42); or that he grew up in sleepy small-town Buckinghamshire; or that these were the boring 1950s - The Brains Trust, Billy Cotton's Band Show - when entertainment was hard to find. But at the back of it was something his great-uncle George said six days before he died: "When you are grown up, you must go to Swan River, Manitoba."

Young David took these words as a solemn command (rather like "If you build it, they will come" in Field of Dreams) and carried them in his head for 40 years, sensing that they could unlock the secrets of his family. It's only in the final pages, in 1998, that we see him driving through the Prairies in a rented car, on the last leg of his journey. But there is never a doubt that Swan River is where the book must end.

Grandfather Tom disappeared to Manitoba in the early 1900s, leaving behind a wife and young family. He'd had a good job as a successful accountant in London, but ended his days doing manual work and living in a shack in the Prairies: why? That's the central mystery the book explores. But along the way grandmother Sis's diaries, the chief research source, offer fascinations of their own. Before Tom appears, Sis suffers a cruel disappointment, when the man she hopes to marry (and with whom, shockingly for one of her station, she has gone to bed) turns out to be married already. We also glimpse the exotic talents of Rose, "La Frascetti", Sis's sister-in-law, who made a music-hall career by walking about on her hands while playing a violin with her feet.

Alternating with the intimate portrait of a large Victorian family is the story of David's childhood, and in particular his relationship with his father. Thrice married, a successful author earlier in life but by the 1950s a travelling seed-salesman, Reynolds Sr is an endearing but volatile patriarch, whose violence finally proves too much for David and his mother. They bolt to London, and there's a desperate scene in which they huddle in a Chelsea flat while he rampages outside. Husband and wife are not to be reconciled but father and son heal their rift, and the love between them is touchingly conveyed.

By this point, David is a boarder at public school, and the 1960s are in full swing just round the corner from his mother's flat in the King's Road. Disappointed with his A-levels and dazzled by the bright lights, he decides that university is not for him, and works for the British Humanist Association, freelancing for Richard Neville's Oz on the side. Sex, dope, record shops, discos, bistros, Utopian dreams: there's no better time to be young, but David has a shock when he comes across Deborah, his childhood friend, now a heroin addict. In grandfather Tom's day, the big problem had been booze. Plus ça change.

Reynolds went on to have a career in publishing. Ploughing through his grandmother's diaries and learning how to tease the story out of them must have been the ideal apprenticeship for dealing with authors' raw first drafts. Now, with Swan River, he's an author himself. Like all debuts, the book is occasionally gauche; but the unflashy prose and downbeat candour are disarming, and though there are scenes, vividly described, at which he wasn't present or couldn't have remembered in such detail, we don't need the quotes from Aristotle to persuade us that he's telling the truth. His family's story matters to him. Stubbornly, against the odds, he makes it matter to us, too.