Tim Ecott’s mother was forced to steal electricity and water to survive poverty in rural South Africa in the 1980s. His father abandoned the family after growing to hate the stifling heat and the lack of opportunity that thwarted the progress not just of black South Africans, but of a huge underclass of whites too. His family suffered this and more, but Ecott tells the story – of the way a privileged early childhood as part of a military family in Malaysia yielded to a life as penniless immigrants – with the dispassion of a bystander. Ecott’s prose is elegantly sparse, and his reportage often witty and amusing; but his detachment does not make for compelling reading. Instead, like his mother’s reluctance to give her true age, the book’s discrepancies, fleeting characterisations and frustrating vagueness suggest a preference for concealment rather than revelation.
There are golden moments, such as Ecott’s mother’s defiant raging against her predicament and his father’s sad submission to his. But in the end, we learn little about him beyond the basics: that he spent large parts of his childhood abroad; that he is a journalist and novelist; that he had a younger brother and sister and a family teeming with eccentrics and irrepressible grande dames. It isn’t enough.
