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Take Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself  by Jonathan Taylor
(Granta Books, £12.99) 274pp.
Available from www.granta.com


It’s not entirely surprising that Jonathan Taylor’s memoir of his father’s loss of memory due to Parkinson’s arrives with praise from John Bayley, as Take Me Home falls into a similar category of non-fiction as Bayley’s own memoir of the descent into Alzheimer’s of his late wife Iris Murdoch, as recently filmed by Richard Eyre. Linda Grant’s memoir of her mother Rose’s premature slide into dementia, Remind Me Who I Am Again, might be another point of comparison, and like both those books, Loughborough-based Taylor’s account uses the effects of the illness as a means of exploring the nature of memory itself. The narrative is structured around a kind of transfer of memory from father to son. As the Parkinson’s begins to blur and erase the father’s identity, the son’s research discovers ever more about his past, moving from the everyday material of family lore to a former life that the father has long concealed, ranging from yachting trips to the Isle Of Man when it was being used as a wartime internment camp for enemy aliens such as Kurt Schwitters and two future members of the Amadeus Quartet (a location that Taylor memorably describes as “an Orwellian Butlins”) to the hints and shades of a possibly dubious figure in the past impossible to fully retrieve. Taylor’s attempt to reconstruct his father’s life is thwarted by his subject’s own unreliability as narrator while he lived, claiming to have served in Korea during national service, but probably just confusing TV images with his own experience, and all this in a context where the family already had a “propensity for embellishment” of the truth. As a reflection on the nature of memory and our near universal inability to ever finally know or comprehend the motives of another person, however close to us we feel he or she may or ought to be, Take Me Home is a beautifully constructed and often profound piece of work. Along the path to his final failure to grasp the truth of his father’s character, resigning himself in a postscript to the acknowledgement that every surviving relative seems to have known a different man (or, at best, a contrasting facet of the same man) Taylor also touches on the broader nature of cultural memory and the writing of history itself. It may not only be individuals whose memories retrospectively rewrite things to suit their current sense of themselves: whole societies do the same thing. This is a multi-stranded book, difficult to categorise precisely. It falls partway between a detective story told in reverse, a family memoir, a philosophical treatise, a post war social history and an often very funny account of everyday eccentricities and quirks. The key to Taylor’s success, however, is to retain an ability to see his father with an acute, unsentimental eye that respects his finally unknowable nature without anywhere feeling like a breach of trust or an attempt to exploit him as mere material. The father may occasionally mistake his own son for a giraffe, or a despised work colleague, or Humphrey Bogart, but Taylor never mistakes his father for a simple man, granting him the rich and complex existence on the page that is the truest mark of respect.