A central goal of John Lanchester's recent novels — which grounds them in cold reality — is to draw attention to what we might otherwise not want to notice: What are the lies that we must tell ourselves? What must we believe in order to cope with the world? Questions that, perhaps unsurprisingly, spring directly from his own life.
John Lanchester was born in Hamburg Germany in 1962. He was an only child. His father, Bill, was a banker at the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, and his mother, whom he knew as Julie, was a homemaker. The family moved frequently, going from what was then called Rangoon to Calcutta to Labuan before settling in Hong Kong. At the age of 10, Lanchester matriculated at Gresham’s, a boarding school in Norfolk, a world away. Early on, Lanchester began to suspect something wasn’t entirely right with his family, even if he couldn’t say why or what. “My parents didn’t much go in for directly telling me things,” he reflected later in his memoir, Family Romance.
His mother, born Julia Gunnigan, grew up on a farm in County Mayo, Ireland. At 16, she went to a Catholic boarding school to become a nun, but returned home after only a year — and was shunned by her parents as a result. Years later, she wound up in Dublin, became a nurse, worked in a tuberculosis sanatorium, contracted the disease herself, then met and fell in love with another patient. Just before their wedding, he died abruptly. Thinking it was perhaps a sign from God, she returned to the convent and succeeded this time in becoming a nun. After 15 years of missionary work, mostly in India, she moved to London and fell in love once more. This second man disappeared. The next man with whom she fell in love, Bill, became her husband for the rest of her life. Only close to the end of it would she let him in on the central secret of her existence.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Bill had always wanted a large family. Julie was already 40 and assumed that she wouldn’t be able to provide one. But she lied to Bill, telling him she was only 31. She used her younger sister Dilly’s papers to get a fraudulent British passport. Fearing her family might expose her, she broke with them completely; in order to keep her story straight, she omitted her missionary work from discussions of her life. Nine years had to disappear. The Lanchester family referred to her deflections as the “Enquiry Suppression Field.” There was an understanding that large swaths of her life were simply not to be discussed. It was only after John’s mother died in 1998 that he spoke to his aunt Peggie. With his mother’s conflicting passport and birth certificate in hand, he unraveled the truth.
There are many things one could say about how all of this relates to John Lanchester. You could argue that it inspired the investigative prowess that makes his nonfiction so spellbinding, that it brought him to terms with the many secrets and duplicities of the world that he shows in his fiction. But it also demonstrates how we are all reticent to know the less pleasant truths of our lives. Lanchester worked through this deceit with both therapy and the partial shield of research and book writing. But, in his memoir, even as he is engaging with his own history, there is a feeling that he is looking at it indirectly. When, for instance, he calls his father “one of the best men I have known,” it comes off as a professional eulogy, not a wholly intimate expression of love.
His mother’s deceptions took a significant toll on Lanchester’s mental health. He excelled in his study of English at St. John’s College, Oxford, but he also suffered a series of panic attacks and a mental breakdown. “The divorce between thought and feeling,” he told an interviewer, “was so complete I barely counted as human.”
As a result, characters with secrets or double lives populate much of Lanchester’s fiction.
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