Adriaan van Dis: My Father's War

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

"No matter how much feuding there is in a family, you always find each other again in the end," says one long-lost aunt in this sombre story of a late-20th century Dutch family still recovering from the Japanese occupation of Indonesia nearly half a century before.

"It's a mystical bond, a filament of mycelium connecting you to your base."

"Dump the lot of them," thinks our brooding narrator in silent reply, "set yourself free from all these crazies, rinse your memory with bleach and forget you ever had a family ... but I really wanted to be a good son so I said: 'How nice to have another aunt suddenly'."

The death of one of his half-sisters prompts our unnamed narrator, in his mid-40s, to deal with memories of his long-dead father, a brutal, violent yet sometimes powerfully charming man. He was a fearless disciplinarian who survived three years and torture in a Japanese concentration camp and a shipwreck at sea, and later used his son as a punching bag for the rages that swept over him.

The narrator has three older half-sisters, whose Indonesian father was killed by the Japanese. With their Dutch mother, they fled back to Holland after the war, where he was born - an outsider in his own family, having not shared their wartime experiences, yet unable to escape their reverberating trauma.

This is an occasionally drily hilarious, but for the most part pretty sombre meditation on the past's existence in the present. As our narrator investigates, his father shifts and changes, depending on who is recalling him.

"Not facing up to the past means being burdened by it for the rest of your life," one of his half-sisters tells him. Burdened he surely is.

His journey is brave and, in the end, his revelations and achievements are peculiarly personal triumphs, not much concern to anyone else, but giving him a path forward in his own life.

This was a bestseller in Holland, with nearly half a million copies sold, which itself seems to affirm the book's central premise: that the rip-tide of World War II is still pulling hard.