Book review: Long Going by Sophie Calon

Desmond Clifford

As the front cover describes it: “A daughter’s memoir of a dad who drank.”  You know it’s not going to unfold well, and it doesn’t.

To call it compelling is both accurate and a source of unease. What we are compelled by is a truly awful story of one man’s decline and eventual death, and the fracture of a family whose collective life disintegrates through the chaos he spread.

Thomas Hardy invokes pity and pathos for characters who tumble downhill, but his characters are fiction, this is life.

Suburban Cardiff

The “story”, if that’s the word, is this.  The author Sophie Calon grows up in pleasant suburban Cardiff, one of three children.  Her brother has health issues. Her father is a lawyer, successful, debonair, sophisticated even, with attitude and, I sense, charisma.

The family took holidays in France; her father took her to South Africa. Sophie has the advantages of an educationally aware and supportive home, combined with high natural intelligence; a life of achievement lies before her.

Her father was always a drinker and alcohol formed part of their social outlook, as it does for so many in our culture.

Progressively her father drank more, and a lifestyle choice turned into profound addiction. This created first tensions and then crises in the family. Her brother’s condition required sensitive handling which her father was less and less able to deliver, despite their having previously been very close.

Sophie herself slipped between wanting to help and wanting to flee, escape eventually the only means of staying afloat.

The family disintegrated.  Her loving and loved father became a source of threat and menace.  Her brother, his life already challenging, spiralled into panic. The father then lived with Sophie at another address; he “could be kind one minute, belligerent the next”, a classic alcoholic trait.

Eventually Sophie couldn’t take anymore and left Cardiff for life elsewhere. Her sister Bee kept an eye on their father even in the most difficult times.

Sophie’s father ended up dead on the street, killed by his addiction, at only 55.

Before that he lost his family, his home, his job, his position in the world, his health and, ultimately, his life.

Intimacy

Her father’s decline takes place in Cardiff and the narrative gives, for this reader, precision and intimacy.  I recognise where incidents take place, in and around my haunts.

Sophie’s father was about my age. I may have stood along the bar from him.  e was homeless and living in a tent on Callaghan Square at a period when I very likely cycled right past him on my morning journey to work, the two of us close in aspects of background but separated by catastrophe.

Until he lost his job, he used to do multi-million pound deals in an office nearby.

Alcoholism is too common but every individual, and every family affected by it, experiences it personally and uniquely.

I am reminded of Tolstoy and the opening to Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

‘Opt-in’

Sophie comments, alcoholism can “look like an opt-in terminal illness.” The disease is caused by something we enjoy – or started out enjoying – and an activity blessed by society.

I’m struck by that phrase phrase “opt-in”.  It seems very relevant. At some level, surely, he must have realised – when he went to prison, lost his job, was living homeless – what he was in the grip of, unless his brain was so far altered that he literally couldn’t think, or preferred not to think, properly.

For many, drink is the corner stone of social life, supported by a vast advertising effort depicting glamour and ease. The number of pubs has dropped drastically but people drink much more at home.

I grew up in a house where a single bottle of sherry was kept under lock and key until Christmas. When I left home, I drank like a fish, as many of my generation did.

There are plenty of male alcoholics in my extended family tree. Late in the day, I decided I’d be better giving up drink altogether, and did. When I see friends enjoying a jar, I feel a bit sorry – and slightly ashamed – that I struggled to regulate my intake.

My son is mid 20s, goes to the pub sometimes, but has never had alcohol. Some of his friends do, others don’t. Drink in our society is a conundrum without a good answer.

Sophie’s story is made more poignant by a poetic sensibility.  The title “Long Going” is a reworking of the familiar Welsh word for longing, “hiraeth”. She has hiraeth for her innocent early years; her father was “long going” in the sense of slowly killing himself – painfully inverting the usual sentiment associated with hiraeth.

The death of Sophie’s father was shocking because he was young.  It brought relief of a kind, but no happy ending. His affairs were a mess and he bequeathed a world of complexity to his family.

Reflection

No happy ending but his death did enable reflection on his character. She says at one stage, “he’d give us anything, anything except that thing we wanted most: for him not to drink.”

A couple of weeks before he died, in a sober moment, he gave £10 to a homeless woman on the street, £10 he didn’t really have. Even in the depths, people don’t always entirely stop being who they are.

Alcoholism is a wide problem, but every testimony is unique.  I’m not sure there are any lessons to be inferred about anything, except this; be lucky.

As a girl Sophie had “a predisposition towards joy.  I was geared to have a good time.”  Any reader of this book will hope she and her family have been able to recapture that happy trait now.

Long Going is published by Honno and is available to buy from all good bookshops.