cover image Your Father

Your Father

Jonathan Myerson, J. Myerson. Headline Book Publishing, $13.99 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-7472-5906-0

Fathers, sons, the British Parliament and the new Russia all have roles to play in this semi-oedipal tale of men fighting their destinies. The protagonist, Duncan Fisk, is a middle-aged MP going through a typical midlife crisis. At a dead end in his career and estranged from his wife, Gina, and young son, Teddo, Duncan feels the same despair that years before caused his schizophrenic brother to take his own life. Adding to his sense of hopelessness is the comparison he must inevitably make of himself with his father, Ronnie, once a dedicated public defender, now a mute invalid following a stroke. An encounter, during a business trip to Russia, with Natalya, a lovely scientist who begs for British funding, jars Duncan from his malaise. But it is his father's written testament, scribbled in a hospital bed, describing his own attempt to deal with a restlessness just like Duncan's, that motivates Duncan to take drastic action, landing him in a dangerous no-man's-land between his old life in England and his potential new one in Russia. Told alternately in Duncan's and Ronnie's voices, the story also skips back and forth between Duncan's past with his family and his present, which itself is split between London and Moscow. Despite this somewhat confusing structure, Myerson (Noise) artfully weaves the plot strands together, and manages to keep Duncan's gloom from slowing the narrative. In the end, Duncan's headlong flight into the great Slavic unknown of present-day, lawless Russia, where anything goes, seems implausible. Nevertheless, Myerson's depiction of father-son relationships is compelling, and his smooth, neat prose is eminently readable. (Sept.)