Our fathers

Andrew O’Hagan, Our Fathers. Faber and Faber, 1999, pp 282, ISBN: 0-571-19502-4

Rallying the rent-striking slum dwellers of Govan during the First World War, Effie Bawn, one of the many significant mothers in Andrew O’Hagan’s first novel, Our Fathers, demands they be given "a room to live in and one to die in." It is a slogan which belongs to the heroic age of Scottish socialism when ordinary women took to the streets of Glasgow and armed only with the "banner of common sense", defeated the "landlord huns" cowering behind the windows of their "curlicued, ampersanded companies."

At the other end of the century, the socialist dream has become a housing scheme and Effie’s son, the great Hugh Bawn, modernist master-builder and Glasgow’s Mr. Housing, lies dying on the eighteenth floor of an Irvine tower block trying to come to terms with a world which has disowned him. Firm in his conviction that if it is good enough for you it is good enough for me, he is determined to see out his days in one of the "machines for living" with which he has reinvented the Scottish skyline.

Despite his resolve, however, Hugh is finally removed to the local hospital: the lifts his doctor points out, even when they are working, aren’t big enough to accommodate a coffin.

Our Fathers is the story of modernist hopes turned into postmodern ironies, of a world which has outgrown the ideals that shaped it. It is the story of the lost language of "housing" and the associated "legend of progress" – the loss of faith in a better tomorrow – as it is played out across four generations of an Ayrshire family whose peculiarity is that they "would never leave houses alone."

As such Our Fathers is a hugely ambitious novel which sets out to articulate its own distinct vision of a Scotland where social change is "bred in the bone," a Scotland that has made "a legend of change, of socialist leaders, and future bliss." But O’Hagan is concerned too with how we learn to live with that legend, with our relationship with the past. Thus instead of a family saga moving down the generations his narrative is mediated through the consciousness of the thirty-five year old Jamie Bawn as he returns to Scotland to attend the dying Hugh in the last few months of his life.

An urban demolition expert whose professional life is devoted to blowing up the monuments of the modernity invented by his grandfather, and a refugee from a childhood terrorised by a drunken and violent father, Jamie is a perfect vehicle for exploring the parallels between the failures of the paternalistic socialism of the planners and of paternity, Scottish style, in general.

Jamie returns to confront demons which are more than personal. He must learn to forgive the past its mistakes in order to get on with the future: to forgive his fathers, real and spiritual, in order to become a father himself. Summarising the novel in a sentence he observes: "I came home to Ayrshire thinking I would take a stand against Hugh’s delusions. But that is not what happened. I stood beside him, and listened to his life, and I held his hand, and I finally grew up."

It is unfortunate for the development of the novel that Jamie does not make more of a stand against his grandfather’s delusions. Forgiveness, the reader soon discovers, can be too easily bought, and Jamie instead of challenging the precepts of the planners becomes their apologist almost from the novel’s outset. His granddad may view him as a turncoat and a wrecker, but Jamie dynamites the world Hugh built in full consciousness of its significance. He knows that the tower blocks "stood for how others had wanted to live, for the future they saw, and for hopes now abandoned."

Watching the obliteration of another Gorbals high rise, he even feels compelled to apologise to the men of his grandfather’s generation who had failed to factor the human material into their calculations of stress and tolerances:

Sorry. Thank you.

And yes, I know. They say there was nothing of aerosols then. Nothing of satellite telly and dining rooms. People wanted to be like other people. And now they want to be themselves, they want garages and trips abroad and a different-coloured door.

Musing further on this latest episode in Scotland’s long history of `removals’ he sees that it is not only the ideals of their architects which are vanishing with the demolition of the "tall houses," but the past of the people themselves:

The sadness you feel when a house comes down. You feel for the people who lived there. All those sitting rooms and painted walls, gone in an instant, as if the hours that passed inside meant nothing much, as if they never happened. The shape of those rooms will always remain in the minds of those who lived there. People will grow up with a memory of their high view over Glasgow.... And above all that they will bring back innocence: a memory of the day-to-day; a time when the rooms felt modern and good, when no one imagined their obliteration. The people went into those towers with hope: life will always be like this, they thought. but what they thought came down with the rubble too....

Although Jamie’s lament for the thinning of the Glasgow skyline serves as a valuable corrective to our impulse to forget rather than come to terms with the past, his early and almost unreserved turn to eulogy deprives the novel of any more critical account of the high-rise.

Apart from a brief glimpse of a hall floor carpeted with aerosols and lager cans, the only alternative to Jamie’s historicising apologetics is provided by its most unsympathetic character, a Saltyre journalist: "Your cunt of a granda took the people for a ride. Progress and progress and progress my arse! Don’t blame the people in here. We’re the ones who had to live in his fucking hovels."

So rabidly expressed the critique is easily dismissed. The man is, in Hugh’s phrase, "a forgetter of past necessities": the towers may have been bad, but they were a damn site better than the slums they replaced; the developers may have used cheap materials but – in Hugh’s case at least -- that was to build more blocks to give more people houses. Or as Jamie puts it: "Even his greatest mistakes came from a better place than your truths."

Jamie is unable to ask the hard questions. How did Effie’s good common sense turn into Hugh’s concrete-clad megalomania, how could the architects of modernity have so catastrophically miscalculated the basic human need for community, how far did the high-rise itself contribute to the social change which led to its rejection?

Because we never hear the authentic voice of the "disgruntled people in the air" the novel lacks any real sense of dialectic and, at some 300 pages, begins to seem directionless. The same problem affects its exploration of the issues of paternity. When the alternatives are Hugh with his plans and visions and promises, and his father with his bottle and overwhelming sense of past betrayals, Jamie’s choice is never in doubt: he is first and foremost his granda’s boy. Age may have bought some perspective – "As children we loved those men. They could have told us the Clyde was all gold. They seemed so smart about the things that scared us" – but even in his decline Hugh remains

the great man who rescued Jamie from his father’s "house of paper and powder and weed" in much the same way as he had rescued the Scottish people from their tenements "scarred and black as lungs."

Ironically it is Jamie’s very inability to escape the influence of his granddad which prevents the novel collapsing under the burden of memorialising. Jamie as narrator shares the grand vision of Hugh as architect, the same sense of the dialectic of flesh and stone, history and geology, of the vegetable become mineral, and the effect can be compelling:

At the back of these Ayrshire hills were broken castles. And under them the putrified hearts of great men. The open moors now bore the names and marks of their Covenant spirit. Many a song stood still in the long grass... The burr of reform still rolled in the Garnock valley. Out there in the dark places, men and women had died for Melville and Knox and the ground was sown with their beliefs. And now it seemed but whispering grass. The old stories gone, of ministers and miners, of Union men, of troops, and now the land had been cleaned. Japanese factories would be coming soon.

Those fields of blood and carbon. They became the sites for the newer wars, our battles for houses and redevelopment .....

O’Hagan’s ability to situate post-war reconstruction in Scotland’s long history of `Improvement’ is matched by his ability to reconstruct, via a dazzling form of social stenography "the typical forms behind lighted windows", to survey the quantity of a life from a single snapshot in a bar:

But the women just went on as before. Alice was right about them. They knew how to enjoy themselves. They knew they wouldn’t have to wait around for tragedy. In years to come there’d be cancers and cures, failures of the heart, trouble with nerves. Husbands would wander; a car would appear out of nowhere. The women in this group would one day have police at their doors.

This is a poetics of synecdoche which goes back to Auden and MacDiarmid and while it may yet be a little early for the sentimental rehabilitation of the high rise, we should be grateful that O’Hagan has himself provided such a well-proportioned room in which to mark its passing.

Niall Martin Amsterdam