Our Fathers [Paperback]

Andrew O'Hagan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 25, 2001

Hugh Bawn was a modern hero, a dreamer, a man of the people who revolutionized Scotland's residential development after World War II. Now, as he lies dying in one of his own buildings, his grandson Jamie comes home to watch over him. It is Jamie who tells the story of his family, of three generations of pride and delusion, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of political idealism. It is a tale of darkness amidst the search for Utopia. A poignant and very powerful reclamation of the past, Our Fathers is also a clearsighted and beautifully crafted look at public and personal history.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In literature, at least, most family sagas conform to a fairly simple pattern: rise and fall. Seldom, however, does this narrative arc take so concrete a shape as it does in Our Fathers. The hero of Andrew O'Hagan's first novel has spent the postwar era preaching the virtues of modern housing: "Most of the high-rises on the west coast of Scotland were made, or inspired, out of Hugh Bawn's zeal, and his tireless days as a housing boss. A priest of steel decking and concrete was Hugh." Yet the novel is narrated by this master builder's grandson, Jamie, who happens to make his living as an urban demolition expert. More than once he's helped to tear down the very edifices his grandfather erected--setting off both literal and Oedipal explosions in the process.

Now, however, Hugh is on his deathbed, and Jamie has returned to Ayrshire to make peace with the old man. Not surprisingly, he also finds himself reckoning with the shadow of his father--a brutal drunk who managed to alienate three generations of the family in one go. As its title suggests, O'Hagan's novel is primarily a meditation on paternity, which in Scotland, anyway, seems to amount to the kiss of death:

In my father's anger there was something of the nation. Everything torn from the ground; his mind like a rotten field.... Our fathers were made for grief. They were broken-backed. They were sick at heart, weak in the bones. All they wanted was the peace of defeat. They couldn't live in this world. They couldn't stand who they were.

To his credit, Jamie can hardly stand who he is, either: he senses that grief and weakness aren't merely national conditions but human ones. And as Andrew O'Hagan's mouthpiece, he attains some splendid rhetorical heights. Yet his voice gets muffled, and sometimes silenced entirely, by the author's multigenerational ambitions. There are too many Bawns in this novel, too many tales, and too many miserable transactions between father and son. O'Hagan's prose is perhaps worth the price of admission. Yet Our Fathers, like the Scots communities that Jamie so explosively reshapes, is itself a victim of excessive sprawl. --James Marcus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Scottish writer O'Hagan's first book, The Missing, was a well-received nonfictional compound of memoir and journalism on the subject of missing persons. Now, switching competently to fiction, he has produced a family melodrama and novel of social consciousness spanning four generations. Jamie Bawn's grandfather, Hugh, better known as "Mr. Housing" from his days as Labour's Public Works mastermind, is dying in a grim flat in one of the many Glasgow high-rises he erected in the name of progress. To Hugh's pride and dismay, Jamie has followed in his footsteps and, after briefly deserting Glasgow for Liverpool, is now assisting with the demolition of his grandfather's buildings, for the good of a new generation. As he nears death, Hugh is under investigation for cutting corners in the construction of his utopian towers, but Jamie knows that though the allegations are true, Hugh intended to pass his savings on to needy tenants. In a bedside vigil lasting many weeks, Jamie devotes himself to his grandfather, their sparring underlaid with prickly affection. Jamie also reminisces about his father, Robert, a crude and abusive drunkard who hated his son, and Hugh's mother, Effie, the family's first idealist, who led rent strikes in Glasgow's tenements during WWI. If Jamie and Hugh are too strong as individuals (and political animals) to reconcile completely, Jamie's watch over Hugh's last days gives him enough perspective to allow him to reestablish contact with his estranged father. O'Hagan's control over the Glaswegian idiom never slips as his characters tentatively get in touch with their feelings in most un-Scottish fashion. Skirting sentimentality and never indulging in it, Our Fathers deftly balances generational conflict with political struggles in a hardnosed, reform-minded Scotland. Author tour. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (January 25, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156012022
• ISBN-13: 978-0156012027
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #939,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spellbinding and magnificent: I laughed and cried, July 30, 2002

By 

Stephanie Cowell - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Fathers (Paperback)

The beauty of the language and the young man's feelings for his father and his grandfather, and the astonishing resolution tucked in a few lines like one beautiful pebble on a great shoreline. He writes of the heart. I could not put it down and missed it awfully when it was over.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Building the Future, June 24, 2004

By 

J C E Hitchcock (Tunbridge Wells, Kent, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Our Fathers (Paperback)

"Our Fathers" tells the story of the last few weeks in the life of Hugh Bawn, a once-powerful local politician. Bawn, an idealistic Socialist, was during the fifties, sixties and early seventies, the chairman of Glasgow City Council's Housing Committee, and was responsible for building the tower blocks which at the time were seen as the answer to the city's perennial housing problems. At the time when the book is set (the mid-nineties), however, Bawn is a sick and dying old man, living in a flat in one of his own blocks. He is visited by Jamie, his grandson whom he has not seen for many years. Ironically Jamie, who now lives in England, is a demolition contractor who makes his living by demolishing blocks of the type that his grandfather was instrumental in building. The story is mostly told from Jamie's viewpoint, although there are also passages of third-person narrative filling in the details of Hugh's past life. Besides narrating what occurs during the three months or so that he spends in Scotland with his grandparents, Jamie also tells of his own past, particularly his miserable childhood at the hands of his brutal, alcoholic father, Hugh's son Robert.

The book raises a number of interlinked questions concerning the conflict between idealism and pragmatism, the conflict between the desire for change and the desire to preserve the past and the conflict between the generations. Building, of course, is frequently used, especially by the political Left, as a metaphor for effecting social or political change, in phrases such as "building the future" or "building a new society". Hugh sees himself as a builder in both the literal and the metaphorical senses of the word. His quarrel with Jamie's generation is that they are, both literally and metaphorically, demolishing what his generation built. In Hugh's eyes modern politicians, both Conservative and New Labour, are undoing the social reforms of the past.

There is no doubting the sincerity of Hugh's desire for social reform, rooted in his own impoverished Glaswegian childhood. Nevertheless, his plans to improve the world have proved less successful than he hoped. The buildings he constructed are unpopular with those who have to live in them and with the wider public who regard them as eyesores. At the end of his life, he finds himself under attack, accused of cutting corners and using cheap materials in his zeal to build as many housing units as quickly and as cheaply as possible. It always struck me that the attraction of the high-rise tower block to the planners, architects and housing officials of the third quarter of the twentieth century stemmed less from a sober calculation of its benefits and disadvantages than from an emotional commitment to "modernity" for its own sake. From their perspective, the main advantage of the tower-block was precisely that it was radically different from any form of housing that had preceded it. Today, it is the tower blocks themselves that look like outdated relics of a bygone age, far more than do conventional houses built during the same period. Nothing dates more quickly than yesterday's view of tomorrow.

As one might expect with a book dealing with the dying days of an old man, there is little in the way of dramatic action. Mr O'Hagan's main concern is with his characters'- especially Jamie's- thoughts and feelings. In some ways it struck me, despite its length of nearly three hundred pages, as being closer to a long short story than to a traditional novel. In places it can seem static, but overall there is, nevertheless, a sense of movement, as Jamie comes closer to reconciliation with his grandfather and a partial understanding of what the old man and his contemporaries were trying to achieve. There is also a sense that Jamie is moving closer to forgiving his own father, whom he meets again at Hugh's funeral.

The writing struck me as uneven. Mr O'Hagan has a good eye for the details of modern urban life, and conveys the beauty of the Scottish landscape in some of the finest passages in the book. On the other hand, some of the lengthy dialogues tended to drag, as did passages such as the description of Hugh's funeral. I was both fascinated and frustrated by the characters, especially the flawed idealist Hugh- frustrated in that I found myself wanting to know much more about his previous life than I was actually told. I wanted to know more about his childhood, his time as Glasgow's "Mr Housing" and his relationship with his own son Robert. I wanted to know why the son of an idealistic reformer should have become a cynical, drunken ne'er-do-well. (There is a hint, not fully developed, that Hugh was too preoccupied with political affairs to have much time for his family). If Mr O'Hagan is considering writing a sequel, there is certainly enough material here for a second novel.

Although this is not a great novel, it is both a readable and an interesting one, introducing an fascinating character and touching upon such major topics as religion (Hugh and his wife are devout Catholics), the decline of traditional Socialism, the clash between ideals and reality, the Scottish national identity, the relationship between the generations and the burden of inheritance.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Long Road to Forgiveness, September 5, 2000

By 

Andrew Karbovsky - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Fathers: A Novel by the Author of The Missing (Hardcover)

Being not a Scot myself, I eschew to contradict the previous reviewer from Scotland in a question of author's seriousness and profundity in depiction of Scottish problems. I'll only try to evaluate the novel from impartial point of view of a man who was born in other country.

In his first novel Andrew O'Hagan raises a serious problem of conflict and misunderstanding of generations. Hugh Bawn, a grandfather of Jamie Bawn who is a protagonist of the novel, in postwar era made his best to eliminate Glaswegian terrible slums and give every citizen a clean and decent flat in tower blocks. He used cheap materials in construction in order to build more houses, not so comfortable but undoubtedly affordable. But the new times come, and today people, whose parents were glad to live in Hugh's houses, tear down the old structures to make way for the new and cast a slur upon Bawn. For those who live on the land of the former Soviet Union the depicted situation is a kind of allegory of our modern life, a portrait of "those fogetters of past necessities, those rectifiers of big mistakes" who discern in the history of our country in the 20th century only Stalin but never arduous labor of hundreds of our grandfathers, the Soviet Hughs, in their attempts to make life of millions better. The principle formulated by Jamie Bawn announces a motto of a conscious part of the new generation: "I wanted my own day, but not at the expense of every day that preceded".

The novel describes alienation between the members of three generations of the Bawn family. Hugh (first generation) is a passionate builder but he has no time for his son Robert (second generation), whom he despises for his inabilities. Robert, being unable to change his father's opinion, hates him instead and becomes a drunkard in fruitless efforts to find his place in the world. He abuses his wife and hates his son Jamie (third generation) who hates him in return and escapes to his grandfather. Jamie is an ardent listener of Hugh's knowledge, but in adulthood he uses this knowledge in demolition of the buildings previously constructed by his grandfather. The train of hatred seems insurmountable, but Hugh's incurable illness gives Jamie possibility to escape an ordinary life rote and time to recall and understand. He, who decided to stop his family probles and sins simply by refusing to marry and have children, commences a hard process of foregiveness of inveterate deep offences...

The language of the novel is poetically terse with a lot of beautiful images and oxymorons, sometimes it is necessary to read a sentence at least twice to understand its true meaning. It is a very good novel justly shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. It resembles Seamus Deane's masterpiece "Reading in the Dark" which I personally prefer.