Outstanding

I have read this deeply affecting work several times since it was first recommended to me fifty-odd years ago, but this is the first time I have listened to it. It is wonderfully well read, thoughtful, involving and moving. A better narrator for this book cannot be imagined.

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Beautifully written and absolutely riveting

Another book I discovered through listening to the wonderful Backlisted podcast. Sir Edmund Gosse CB (21 September 1849 – 16 May 1928) was an English poet, author and critic. He was strictly brought up in a small Protestant sect, the Plymouth Brethren, but broke away sharply from that faith.

'Father and Son' is his account of his childhood and his gradual questioning of the fundamentalist religion of his parents. All of which might make this book sound like a misery memoir, and yet nothing could be further from the truth. This is a charming, fascinating and insightful account of Victorian life in the mid-18th century with numerous wonderful little details.

'Father and Son' is subtitled “A Study of Two Temperaments” and this signals the approach of Edmund Gosse. He retained enormous respect and affection for his father but ultimately there was to be no way for the different personalities to be true to themselves and reconcile their differences.

It's beautifully written and, as I suggest, absolutely riveting, complete with numerous funny and idiosyncratic memories from a childhood spent both in Islington and, from around age 6, in Ilfracombe in Devon, then, as now, a small and sleepy backwater.

I listened to Father and Son (1907) narrated by the peerless Geoffrey Palmer, and courtesy of Audible. Incredibly, this wonderful experience only set me back three British pounds. What a bargain. It's a wonderful book.

5/5

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2 people found this helpful

One of the great Autobiographies.

This is a very special book. It tells the story of the young Edmund Gosse's painful journey to break free from the existential straightjacket of Victorian religious fundamentalist thought to embrace the world as a freethinking individual. It is the story of a young child's internal battle for self identification against the overwhelming steamroller of religious conditioning.

Born into a family of eminent Plymouth Brethren he is, from birth, relentlessly conditioned to believe himself to be one of the elect by loving but narrowly overbearing parents. Alienated from his peers by a perceived, inherited, elevated status, he spends his young life tottering on the edge of a nervous breakdown as he strives to make sense of a world defined by rigid dogma coupled with a pious lack of imagination. Indeed, growing up in a house where any work of literary fiction is condemned as a wilful act of deceit he is condemned to grow in a cultural, social and existential vacuum.

When his mother dies of cancer he is left in the care of his grieving Zoologist father who is going through his own crisis as he strives to develop a theory to disprove the teachings of Darwin.

There is early rebellion when young Edmund wilfully worships a chair (a wooden idol) only to find that a wrathful God does not strike him down as he's been led to believe. There is an almost messianic pride when, at his father's prompting, he is elevated to become one of the elect (a position reserved only for adults) while still a mere child. There is confusion and wonder when he discovers the mystical power of poetry which further erodes the vice like grip of his fathers religious dogma.

At the age of sixteen he finds himself 'still but a bird fluttering in the network of my fathers will and incapable of the smallest independent action' and slowly realizing that he and his father 'walked in opposite hemispheres of the soul with the thick of the world between us.'

This is a beautiful, sometimes wryly funny - but immensely sad childhood reflection, written without a hint of self pity. It tenderly evokes a world long gone through the eyes of a sensitive child in an impossible situation. It is, above all, the testimony of a butterfly pinned to a page in his father's book, gradually understanding the nature of his dilemma and struggling to fly free from his father's page.

Geoffrey Palmer's narration is faultless.

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Wonderful reading of a tender and funny memoir

Some accuse Gosse of demonizing his father, which was certainly the impression I had before listening to this book. While Gosse's father was a purist in his view of Christianity, he was also a tender and, in his way, loving father, and I thought the portrait sympathetic. A humor based on long perspective and understanding enlivens the book, and Geoffrey Palmer's reading makes it shine. The combination of his nuanced interpretation and Gosse's rich Victorian prose is marvelous. A thoroughly enjoyable listen.

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Enjoyed a lot

Narration was spot on!
Gosse writes about his relationship with his brethren minister father and mother. In ~1857 his mother dies when he still a young child, and the book concludes when he is a young man trying to break away from his overweening father. Fascinating detail with some humour.

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