Family skeletons

THEY are four very different writers - in fact only one of them is a professional writer; others simply happened to write and mostly for extra-literary reasons - but these days they are mentioned in nearly the same breath and their works discussed with identical passion. Reason: the dirty family linen which has always attracted attention not because it necessarily stinks but because most people have a prurient interest in other people's laundry.

So, we have Margaret Drabble digging up disturbing memories of her mother in her latest novel The Peppered Moth; Margaret Salinger exposes the ugly side of her famous father, novelist J.D.Salinger, in her memoirs, Dream Catcher (clearly a play on the father's classic novel Catcher in the Rye); Bettina Rohl casts a fiery glance at the life of her terrorist mother Ulrike Meinhoff, a leader of the ultra Left Baader-Meinhoff gang of the 1960s in a forthcoming book; and Richard Tomlinson has skeletons tumbling out of a family of a different kind: the British intelligence agency MI6.

Tomlinson is the odd man out among three women brooding over their parents, and revisiting their childhood to purge themselves of their tortured memories of what their parents were really like. While Drabble deploys the "unquiet ghosts of motherhood", as The Guardian put it, simply to weave fiction out of it, the other two daughters have other purposes in exhuming their parents' private lives for public viewing. "Peggy" Salinger, who claims to have had a tortured relationship with her father whom she recalls as an extremely self-centred and unfeeling person, says her memoirs are as much an attempt to understand him as to let the world get a glimpse of the real Salinger - an insensitive, self-serving figure lurking behind the great novelist. "The experience of being a Salinger is unique. The experience of being a daughter is universal. The letters I have received from people saying 'I had a father I was imprisoned by too' made me realise I was touching a large nerve raw", she told The Times.

The book has upset her mother and brother who have said it is full of inaccuracies, and, as for Salinger himself, he has been characteristically uncommunicative. Incidentally, Drabble's book has annoyed her novelist sister, A. S. Byatt who, in the words of one of her own characters, thinks that "no one has the necessary right to publish what they know." Bettina Rohl's book (Sag Mir Wo Du Stehst in German meaning "Tell Me Where You Stand") is a political project, and been called a part of her "campaign of revenge against the political Left". She was brought up literally in the lap of Left extremism - at the age of seven she and her twin sister were kidnapped by an even more extreme Left group - and lived in the womb of revolutionary terrorism. Being the daughter of one of the world's best known terrorists was not easy: an unstable family life and the pressures of living dangerously took their toll. She was only 14 when her mother hanged herself in jail. According to a close family friend, she felt her mother didn't love her and "this is a dangerous wound she is trying to heal." Others think there is a political motive: one is her own deep seated aversion to the German Left-wing radicalism, and the other to "expose" some leading contemporary German politicians who were a part of the radical movement in the 1960s and are now serving the state. Hence the title:"Tell Me Where You Stand." The book, to be published in April, is awaited with bated breath my many in Germany, particularly its foreign minister Mr. Joschka Fischer, who was a radical Left wing activist in his youth.

Tomlinson's book, The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security, which threatens to expose MI6's "dirty tricks" and is to be published in Russia, has aroused interest because of the British Government's attempt to prevent its publication in Britain. Tomlinson is a former MI6 agent who was dismissed - "unfairly" he claims - and jailed in 1997 for violating the Official Secrets Act. He lives in Italy and has accused MI6 of harassing him. The British Government thinks that he is acting at the behest of the Russian intelligence service, and his threat to reveal detailed inside information about MI6 has unnerved the establishment. Newspapers have been barred from publishing any "unauthorised disclosures" but The Sunday Times, which published an extract from the book, has decided to challenge the injunction.

Meanwhile critics are wondering how many family skeletons they can possibly cope with in a season. There has already been one too many this winter.

A new look

Zadie Smith, the bespectacled and grizzly-haired literary sensation, has dumped her heavy glasses, straightened out her hair and gone so completely hep that one critic at The Guardian awards function where her novel White Teeth got a prize, thought that she was "some glamorous Penguin PR girl accepting the prize in her absence". In contrast to her photograph on the book jacket, here was a "svelte figure with dead straight hair extensions, lip gloss and doe eyes looking more like Cher than the George Eliot of multiculturalism", the critic recalled with barely suppressed sneer. She has, however, assured that the new look is temporary and that her old hair and the glasses are on their way back. Really? But why?

HASAN SUROOR

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