“You give so much of yourself away in the beginning, so much that at times it doesn’t seem right or fair.” This is one of many intriguing insights into relationships given by narrator Des over the course of Catherine Talbot’s engaging debut novel, A Good Father.
The statement has value in its own right, but takes on new meaning as we go deeper into the troubled home life he shares with his artist wife, Jenny, and their three children. By the end of this twisty, complex story, we learn that Des has wilfully deceived his spouse right from the beginning of the relationship, hiding his own personality in favour of a construct of a good guy, then a good boyfriend, a good husband, and finally, the titular good father.
What elevates Talbot’s narrative is the fact that Des doesn’t really understand the difference between his constructs and himself. The goodness that he manufactures for selfish gains – like any sociopath worth their salt – seems to bleed into his personality. Throughout the book we see evidence of a loving father and husband, a man who sacrifices his own life and desires for the happiness of his family, a man who does not shirk the responsibilities of fatherhood – who if anything, takes on the lion’s share of the load.
And yet. The signs of Des’s controlling nature are there from the beginning: how he’s drawn to Jenny because of her vulnerability at an exhibition on Lennox Street, how he hopes to save her (from what, we can only wonder), marry her, call her his own. He is a captivating protagonist, clearly on tilt but brutally self-aware: “In a place far away from here I would probably be very happy. This is my mantra.”
Marriage and parenthood don’t bring the security Des so desperately craves. If anything, he longs for the past, the heyday at the start of the romance, the fairy tale before the reality.
Suspense of why
At the heart of Talbot’s novel is a study of familicide, an exploration of the mind of a man who kills his family. This is no plot spoiler. Des admits this in the opening pages, so the suspense stems not from what will happen but rather from why he did it – and why he is still alive to tell the tale when so many of these sad stories end in murder-suicide. The latter question doesn’t really get answered, but Talbot gives us a convincing study of a man whose complex inner world is only revealed to those closest to him.
You know the story, you’ve heard the neighbours who never dreamt in a million years that this upstanding member of the community could commit so heinous an act. Talbot’s success is to scratch at the facade of social civility and examine what lies beneath.
Her debut is in many respects classic domestic noir – twisty marital dramas such as Before I Go to Sleep, Gone Girl or, here at home, the acclaimed novels of Liz Nugent, which look at the ugly side of close relationships. Like Nugent, Talbot has a way with place. Dublin, "dirty, yet forgiving", is vividly evoked in a variety of locations and eras.
A Good Father stands out for its shocking subject matter and the volatility of its protagonist, a man who can hit his wife in the face because she’s taking too long to get in the sea, but who will also do bath-time and bedtime reading and cook conchiglie “because the kids love the shell shape of the pasta”.
Hints of trauma
Nuance is the key to believable domestic abuse stories. (A stellar recent example is the standalone TV show I Am Nicola starring Vicky McClure.) A compelling villain is rarely a villain in their own head. In A Good Father, an underdeveloped backstory of childhood trauma gives hints of where things started to go wrong.
Talbot prefers to focus on the present; commendably she doesn’t look to explain away his behaviour. But the pedestrian details of domesticity can feel repetitive, as does the carping about his responsibilities and, particularly, his wife’s relationship with an underdrawn ex-boyfriend. In place of a plot, we get the inside of one man’s mind, but there is too much of what Des feels in any given scenario, which drags the pace at times. More interesting would have been to go deeper into his disordered eating, a storyline not often seen in a male character.
A Good Father is nonetheless a confident and compelling debut. Readers will come for the premise and stay for its clever unpacking. What makes an ordinary man kill his family? In this multifaceted story, we come close to comprehending the incomprehensible.
