Customer Reviews

PAGAN'S FATHER- P

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Pagan's Father," the story of a gay man's struggle to keep the little girl he has grown to love, is an enjoyable novel. However it was somewhat hampered by several problems I had in reading the story. The novel is written in the present tense, in the form of a letter to Pagan's dead mother, Candida. This grew to be confusing because of the repeated switches in the time period. Many time I was confused about what was going on. Also, I think the book at 400 plus pages was too long. It could have easily been cut down 100 pages or so without losing any of the story. Despite its short-comings, I enjoyed the novel a great deal and thought it had a very good plot and it was compelling enough for me to read in two sittings

Pagan's Father is the best book I've read in quite a long time. It made me cry, laugh, rage with anger, and gave me insomnia! I couldn't put this book down, and devoured it in three days. The only reason why I give it a 9 instead of a 10 is because the author flips back and forth between the past and the present and it was a bit hard to get used it. Other than that, I'd recommend this book to anyone

This is the novel of a five year old girl named Pagan whose mom passes away. Pagan is the child of an unconventional situation -- her artistic mother always refused to name the father of the child and instead chose to raise her in a household with her best friend, a gay talk show host named Leo. To complicate matters, Candida, the mom, is estranged from her own family, who adopted her when she was quite young. After Candida's death, however, her adopted parents come forward to sue for custody of the child whom Leo never formally adopted. What ensues is a sort of made for television movie novel about charges of sexual abuse, family members with repressed memories of sexual abuse, and a family that seems to have more than its share of deep, dark secrets. Personally, I found the editorializing as well as the characterization of working class, small town people as small-minded and petty to be quite annoying. (The grandparents rename the child Patience, for example, because they're uncomfortable with the connotations of Pagan.) The story would have told itself quite well without all this obvious manipulation of the reader. And as I said, I found it muh too graphic to be an enjoyable read.

Throughout its first half, Pagan's Father simmers along quite nicely. Then, as the novel charges toward its final pages, it becomes a gut-churning, all-out potboiler, a story as outrageous and difficult to put down as its politely mannered preamble is to find quibbles with. In the opening sections, British author Michael Arditi (The Celibate) crisply and efficiently etches the difficult - but none too shocking - case of a gay London talk show host, Leo Young, who, after raising a young girl - Pagan - along with the child's biological mother, is threatened with the removal of the child from his custody. The threat comes when the mother dies of a prolonged illness and her previously estranged septuagenarian parents resurface, hoping to spirit away their grandchild. The snippety, snobby grandparents at first seem presented as particularly crusty stereotypes. Arditi's chronicle pleasantly, if predictably, ping-pongs as Leo's custody of Pagan is won, lost, challenged again and so forth. The action bubbles with topicality: sexual orientation, single parenthood, gender roles, and - most interestingly - media interference in personal lives. The latter is given a particularly smart twist here, since Leo himself is - while not quite a celebrity - a bonafide public figure. Arditi even includes editorial essays 'written by Leo' on gay rights in general and on gay parenting. Socially-conscious readers will be moved along by the author's pleasant polemicizing. They will cozy up to the appealing character of Leo. They will be filled with a warm, simmering feeling. And then all Hell boils over. While the first half of Pagan's Father is the mild literary equivalent of potpourri on the stove, it also lulls readers senses before throwing them into the seething cauldron that follows. Scenes of relative domestic bliss - in both Leo and the granparents' households - are blackened by accusations of sexual child abuse that begin to fly from both sides. Is Leo so intent on custody of Pagan that he is willing to make such charges on specious evidence? What are readers won over to sweet Leo to make of his fantasy-fueled attempt to kidnap the child and flee to the continent to escape British authorities. Arditi toys with our resistance to tabloid stereotypes, leading us to gnaw at the pages in genuine suspense, sometimes even prompting us to believe that we have been putty in the hands of perhaps unreliable narrator Leo. There is also a remarkable supporting cast in the book's back end: a dotty former aristocrat, a wheelchair-bound secret informer, a pathetically lecherous old man and a transexual with a shocking revelation. One could call it a soap opera but for the fact that Arditi has given heft and reality to every superficially outrageous bubble. At the center of it all, of course, is a tormented little seven-year-old ripped between two homes and two senses of identity. Arditi wisely chooses not to try seeing the world through a child's eyes and, particularly when Pagan gives cryptic intimations that she may have been abused, the reader must suffer with the same sense of furious, frustrated uncertainty shared by the girl's guardians and by the courts that deal with her cases. As Pagan's Father moves from politesse toward pulp, it takes on a feverish urgency. Michael Arditi starts out by presenting compelling issues, he ends up offering a compelling story as well.

A surprisingly powerful novel. The author manages to overcome a difficult mode of narration (an ongoing conversation with a dead friend and multiple flashbacks), a topic easily accused of over-earnestness and PC-propriety, and some rather excessively ogreish villains to tell a heart-wrenching and unforgettable story in beautiful, poetic and evocative prose. Highly recommended to anyone interested in the subject matter (gay parenting) or fond of a literary, humanistic take on human emotions and personalities. Particularly successful at describing the complex personality of the narrator's dead friend, a difficult and not necessary particularily likeable woman, whom he nevertheless loves deeply, and at convincingly portraying a child's emotional response to the tragic events that befall her: the death of her mother, a bitter and acrimonius custody battle, and sexual abuse. The book's main flaw is the portrayal of the grandparents, who try take custody of Pagan away from the gay friend of her mother, as the blackest of villains unredeemed by any touch of humanity. The argument for a gay person's suitability to parent a child is weakened when the only "straight" alternative is so unpalatable. And conversely, Leo, the gay man in question, is portrayed as an incredibly and perhaps unrealistically good and selfless person, blessed with every material advantage, too. Again, if that is what it takes to be allowed to be a gay parent in public opinion, than we have a long way to go yet....

Just finished reading this book. Kind of long at 400 pages, but a good read. I'm not a person who usually reads books this long either! It's about a little girl named Pagan. When Pagan's mother dies, she is entrusted to the care of her mother's best friend Leo, who happens to be gay. When Pagan's grandparents find out about the arrangement they wage a battle for Pagan, and you will just have to read the book to find out the rest. I liked it enormously.