Fires Which Burned Brightly by Sebastian Faulks review – a grief-infused puzzle of a memoir

In his account of postwar childhood and literary success, the novelist hints at pain he is unable to address directlyIn this not-quite-a-memoir, the novelist Sebastian Faulks gives a fine-grained account of growing up in post-second world war England. In the home counties cottage he shares with his parents and older brother, olive oil does duty not in the kitchen but as a bathroom remedy for bunged-up ears. If you are lucky enough to have a telephone (the Faulks are), it will probably be a “party” line shared with the people next door. Holidays consist of an icy week in Bexhill-on-Sea or, a step up, the Isle of Wight (just as cold but with a nicer class of ice-cream). Then there are all those tight-lipped middle-aged men busying themselves mowing the lawn and going to work in mysterious “offices”. Not so long ago they were shooting down Germans or trying to survive the north African desert.Faulks’s own father is one of these heroes in hiding – a provincial solicitor in a failing practice who won the Military Cross for service in Tunisia. Another is Commander Sanderson, the headteacher of the prep school to which Faulks is dispatched at the age of eight. It is impossible not to feel freshly affronted by a system that routinely sent privileged boys away from home in order to make a certain kind of man of them. No surprise either that at this point Faulks retreats into the third person, as if the obscenity is still too raw to tell directly. “A hopeful, credulous little boy is being unpicked and discontinued. He’s like a creature in a science-fiction story that’s been sent back to have its factory settings altered.” Continue reading...

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