Charles Jennings comes to us recommended by two "wickedly hilarious" earlier books - Up North: Travels Beyond the Watford Gap and People Like Us: A Season Among the Upper Classes. Of the former, the Mayor of Grimsby remarked: "He should have stayed under his duvet down south"; and for his latest volume, the London journalist did just that, more or less. In the interests of humour, it might have been better if the two children who dominate Father Race were flat-capped northerners or Little Lords Fauntleroy, instead of sons and (he hopes) improved versions of the author's Finchley-born, middle-class, wet-liberal self. But as a book which sets out to be brutally honest about child-rearing, it doesn't pull punches. At times, this is Grimsby without the "sby". Father Race starts by dismissing most other people's attempts at the subject as either "chipper no-nonsense handbooks" or essay-style meditations, "maudlin, introspective and bowing under the weight of their own sensitivity". And into the latter category (sharp intake of breath here) he consigns Fergal Keane's Letter to Daniel: "Keane, in all other respects a model of his kind - industrious, fluent, clear-eyed without being unemotional - wrote this one short, moist-eyed, Celtic Twilight piece to his baby son and broadcast it on the BBC, only to find that it was the best-received thing he'd ever done (despite his years of sterling service in Rwanda, Eritrea, Angola, South Africa)."
Exasperated, the author asks "Why does this happen when men write about their own children?" and goes on to find more likeable examples in some famously bad fathers, including Evelyn Waugh (who ate rationed post-war bananas meant for his kids and, in the nearest he got to praising them, once said: "The more I see of other people's children, the less I dislike my own").
Conceding that Keane was writing about an "idealised moment" at the onset of fatherhood, when he was "swept up in the novelty, infatuation, and transforming energy of it all," Jennings nevertheless adds a "Bah, humbug" note: "Another decade and it'll all be horribly different".
It should be said that, even after a decade, Jennings does love his children. Indeed, in yet another thought on the Keane essay ("Am I just being repressed?"), he concludes that he can't say how much his kids mean to him either because it's "incommunicable" or because he fears it would "tempt fate". And he adds, piously: "That's how important they are: so important I can't put it into words".
What he can put into words, shockingly at times, is the extent to which two conscientious, right-on and usually mild-mannered parents can be driven temporarily insane by the pressures of childcare. There is even violence: he smashes a plate (smoked-salmon sandwich and all) on the floor; she hurls a mug of coffee at the wall over his head; she also hits him in the face with "very large" Californian plums ("I was bruised for a week by one").
It's not exactly Quentin Tarantino but, still, this is England. More seriously, he admits to smacking his kids - and, knowing just how waterlogged his brand of wet liberalism is (he tells us often enough), you can't help feeling as appalled as he does at the development. He writes grippingly of his first experience of "real, impotent fury" when his baby son will not stop bawling and he is "just competent enough to realise that what I needed to do was put him down and go away and go mad somewhere else and not actually damage him. Which I duly did, coming back after ten minutes, shaking with fright and remorse."
Such moments of self-revelation apart, however, there's a bit too much self-analysis here, of the Englishman-discovers-emotion type, which becomes as wearing as an afternoon minding someone else's child.
On the other hand, the book is strong on the horrible plethora of contradictory wisdoms about how babies should be raised. It's also good on the sheer time-eating qualities of children, the longest years of whose lives tend to be the shortest of yours. And insofar as there are many things which don't reflect to his credit, the author achieved the aim he set himself, of telling it like it is.
Frank McNally is an Irish Times reporter and columnist
