Coming Home, by Sue Gee

Coming Home by Sue Gee tells the life story of a family, born at the end of Britain's time in India and then making its unassuming way in the aftermath of the Second World War, sending two new lives out into the world while experiencing the fading away of the old.

Many of the books I've read recently have been thought provoking and worthy of comment, and yet I haven't done so. Yet this... Maybe I shouldn't write about it, because there is so much that is personal attached to my response to it. Which I can't ignore. I have glanced at some other reactions to the book, and while it's been mostly liked, it doesn't seem to rank as highly as others of her books. Myself, I have read The Hours of the Night and loved it, it's beautifully written and left a lasting impression. I knew I'd read more by this author.

Coming Home seemed a natural choice, because of its background in British India. This is one of a long list of story elements which are echoed in my own life and in my family's. In our case, it was our Mum who grew up in India where her father my grandfather worked for the railway. He fought in Mesopotamia in WWI; and Mum herself went into uniform with the General Slim's army in Burma in 1944-5. Both were seriously injured in their respective wars. Dad hadn't been in India but as a career Army officer his life was also involved with Empire, and its coming back home. 

I would seem to have been perhaps 7/8 years or so younger than the children in the book. Many details of family life resonate, notably that I was sent away to boarding prep school at the same age as Freddie in the book, and was about as suited to it as he was. Which is to say, not very much at all. I don't have any ill feeling towards my parents about it, it was simply something so many middle class boys did in those days. I didn't share the awful delusion of Freddie's about his birth, but looking back I can see that the feeling of missing out on family life (eg. no birthdays, mine fell during term time) contributed to childhood depression in a major way. Then, later on in life, I also went to York University, to study English. Yes, I recognise many small and large details in the lives of both Freddie and Bea.

I could add much more, quite a list really, but it really would be a matter of missing the wood for the trees. The details aren't the point. Many of those readers who were non-plussed by the book seem to feel that there's no 'story'. I did wonder if one of the editors or Sue Gee herself may have felt the same, because the theme of Freddie's origin may have been introduced to satisfy that 'need'. It didn't ring true for me; it spins off Freddie hearing a brief snatch of speech by his father, "No son of mine..." which as adults, and understanding the bluff character of Will the father, we recognise for what it is, but which young Freddie takes literally as an indication that he was adopted. I feel this is something which would have been resolved by a smart boy like Freddie well before the age at which it all comes out. No, I don't think elements of melodrama like that were needed. I think it's telling - if I read correctly - that that storyline was a wholly fictional one, while most of the book consists of a retelling of Sue Gee's own experience of family life, with mainly the names changed for the sake of objectivity.

Coming Home I felt profoundly, and it was a difficult read in some ways, as my mind spun off into the story of our family. Perhaps it's one of those books which won't mean very much to people outside a certain generation, the middle class British who grew up in the Fifties. I couldn't help alternate waves of sadness and nostalgia. I shouldn't let the melancholy take over though, it's purely the natural feeling one has when the past stretches so far back, into such a different world. A world populated by family who once meant so much but now exist only in memory.

The blurb on the back is a little misleading. India itself has very little presence in the book; its importance is its place in Will and Flo's world view, as the place which formed so much of what they are. But the actual life of the Sutherland family is lived in Southern England, which changes remorselessly of course. We all feel out of touch in the end. It's funny how so many people see their family as almost a fixed thing; but that fixed picture is a different one for each person in it. I'm grateful for this book. It achieves one thing very well, conveying the soul of a family while portraying its growth, its shifts, its fissures, its accidents and its healing. Best of all its elusive fondnesses. The characters in and around the family all change as time goes on, and the author renders it with great empathy. I guess she had to - Bea is her, pretty much.

Coming Home isn't - in my view! - about post colonials adjusting to the end of empire, it's not about changing times, or women venturing outside a domestic life or a dozen other themes of late Twentieth Century history. It's about the beats in the family story, the image of itself which gets presented and sometimes falls apart (if there's one small detail which I can vividly imagine my own father emulating, it's that continually repeated "Oh I don't know..." of Will), and it's about the way the nebulous thing that the family is gradually and inevitably fades away. The theme's there in Flo's sister Vivie's dying words: "...All families disappear, and become one." And the poignant coda, familiar to anyone who's had to organise a house clearance, seen at the end when Bea delves into boxes of old family papers: What is she to do with all this?