Every Time We Say Goodbye: The Story of a Father and a Daughter by Anna Blundy Century 225pp, 12.99 in UK
It would make a good question for one of those multiple choice quizzes you get in yuppie magazines: "If your father had been shot dead in El Salvador while covering the civil war as a foreign correspondent would you, a) avoid wars, foreign correspondents and journalists of all descriptions for the rest of your life, b) get a nice, safe job and keep your head down for ever, c) get on a plane to San Salvador, hang out with his friends, risk finding out all sorts of unpalatable stuff about his death and, indeed, his life, and then write a memoir which will expose you to the close scrutiny of, and possible rejection by, the press pack you now aspire to join?"
After the English journalist David Blundy was killed during fighting between government troops and left-wing rebels in San Salvador in the autumn of 1989, his daughter Anna chose the third option, and in this poignant and funny book she retraces both their separate journeys to south America and their joint progress across the rocky and often dangerous terrain of family life.
She appears to have inherited not just her father's writing ability but his sense of humour as well. In a letter to her, written a year before he died, he mocks her fear of flying: "it is odd that since you mentioned it almost all the passengers on flights originating in the US have been sucked out when large holes appear in the fuselage. It is not worrying of course, but vaguely disconcerting. It is very nice travelling in first class with terrific food and terrific wine, the problem is that you normally get sucked out before you can eat it . . ." A decade later, on a plane to San Salvador and still terrified of flying, she gets into conversation with a guy called Marvin and asks him what the city is like. Apart from the heat, he replies, it's basically like any other city. "This is a guy, I thought, driving into town an hour later, who hasn't been to Geneva."
She brings the same merciless observation to bear on the average foreign correspondent ("Too long in the direct sunlight, too much time plumbing the depths of humanity, too much to drink") retired El Salvadorean politicians of the high-ranking right-wing kind ("a fat old man with a T-shirt stretched over his paunch, thick coiffed grey hair swept back off his face and a set of super-butch car keys hanging from his fingers") and the tabloid newspaper which published a grotesque photograph of her father in the morgue ("In 1993 the same paper ran a hysterical campaign about the evil of the man who dared to take and try to sell photographs of the corpse of soccer legend Matt Busby"). When she talks about her father, of course, her tone is altogether different. She isn't afraid to allow the words to weep; and through all her exasperation, her anger, her little-girl's foot-stomping "I told you this would happen, Daddy", a marvellous affection shines fitfully out like sunshine breaking through clouds. The book is permeated by a sense of loss so insistent that the reader feels it like a physical pain, punctuated - just as grief is - by visions of the dead person, vividly alive. "He could pick you up and put you on his shoulders and you could hardly see the ground. He dipped his cheese in HP sauce and he rocked backwards and forwards in his chair, rubbing his hands on his jeans when he laughed or was saying something funny." This book may not make sense of David Blundy's death, for Anna Blundy or for anyone else, but it's one heck of an epitaph.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times staff journalist