The Good Father
by Liam McIlvanney

There are things you don’t want to be reading when death, or worse, takes a loved one. On the Easter Sunday when my father died, I was cramming the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe for a university American fiction course. ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, ‘The Black Cat’ – Gothic tales that are the stuff of nightmares at the best of times, doubly so when you’re mourning and burying your father.

Gordon Rutherford, a professor of literature and the titular Good Father of Scottish-born, New Zealand-based Liam McIlvanney’s fifth novel, is immersed in the death, violence and all-round uncanniness of Scottish ballads when his seven-year-old son, Rory, goes missing from the beach outside their home in the seaside village of Fairlie. A little too immersed, which only adds to his self-recrimination and the recrimination coming from his wife, Sarah.

Has Rory run away? Been carried away by the waves? Been carried away by something – or rather someone – more sinister? Is he dead or alive? And if alive, who has him and what are they doing to him?

When people use the word ‘unimaginable’, they sell the imagination short. In the Rutherfords’ position, the ‘unimaginable’ is all too imaginable and the imagination runs riot. Why McIlvanney – a father of four – would want to put himself and his readers through the same horrors is anyone’s guess. He even dedicates the novel to one of his sons. An in-joke, presumably. Hopefully.

According to McIlvanney, in an interview about The Good Father with the Sunday Star-Times: ‘There’s something, from both the reader’s and writer’s point of view, that’s appealing about that vicarious experience of these extreme circumstances and emotions that you can play out in a novel, without having to undergo them in real life.’

If he says so. Call me soft, but with all the other horrors happening around the world at the moment, this reader and parent, at least, found this one place too many that was hard to go to. But it was worth toughening up for the ride, because, as always with McIlvanney, it is one full of riveting twists and turns.

The author of the crime novels All the Colours of the Town (2009), Where the Dead Men Go (2013), The Quaker (2018) and The Heretic (2022) has an imagination that is for the most part well up to the task he has set himself with his first foray into what is more ‘psychological thriller’ territory.

The Quaker won the Bloody Scotland McIlvanney Prize for Scottish crime book of the year, named for McIlvanney’s late father, William, a Scottish crime-writing legend often described as ‘the Godfather of Tartan Noir’ Liam is very much a chip off the old block. In The Good Father, McIlvanney takes us in all the directions we might expect, before departing for ones entirely his own, descending into a hell happily beyond most people’s wildest imaginings.

McIlvanney truly plumbs the depths in the novel, reaching into the likely and later less likely experience of someone in Rutherford’s position (alternating between hope and despair, suspecting the people around him and the people around him suspecting him right back, the inevitable wild speculation of strangers that festers away on Facebook).

McIlvanney ratchets up the tension in set-piece scene after set-piece scene thought through to the tiniest detail, in the final stages of the novel moving events along with the momentum and inevitability of a brakeless car careening down a mountain road.

I wouldn’t want to damn The Good Father with the sales-unfriendly label of ‘literary thriller’ (‘psychological thriller’ being by far the preferred term these days), but it is a literary thriller and twice over to boot. First, there’s the quality of McIlvanney’s writing. Bob Jones once told me the difference between his and brother Lloyd’s novels was Lloyd would take three pages to describe what Bob would dispense with in a paragraph. McIlvanney sits somewhere in between. His writing isn’t purely functional, there just to move the plot along. Style shines through. But unobtrusively, judiciously used, not drawing excessive attention to itself; there to appreciate if you’re so minded: a woman’s shoe like a ‘glossy tulip’ growing out of a dusty carpet; ‘secrets that can’t be kept, secrets that permeate a house like damp or the sick scent of lilies’; and at greater length and better still:

There comes a moment when you can no longer hide from a hovering, black-winged truth. When you lose the strength to shoo it away and it settles on a fence-post of your mind, folding its wings and preening its chest with its black beak.

The other way in which The Good Father is a literary thriller is in that it’s concerned with literature, in conversation with it. McIlvanney is Professor of Scottish Studies at the University of Otago, co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature and author of Burns the Radical. He knows all about the ballads and other aspects of Scottish literature Rutherford teaches and talks about. The Good Father could be read as a homage to the gothic of those ballads, an extended prose ballad itself. Continuing the tradition.

The references go beyond Scottish literature to incorporate as broad a range as Edgar Allan Poe (him again, here in the detective mode of his C Auguste Dupin stories) and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch. McIlvanney has Rutherford give a lecture on Scottish writer James Hogg’s 1824 Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner as an important precursor to crime fiction. Here he conveys his intent in the novel to show the gravity of crime and its consequences. The weight of it. However, although he gets closer than many writers, at key moments, and in key respects, he falls short. The Good Father isn’t weighted as much as it should be. In some ways, it trifles with tragedy, failing to give it its full due, tidying it up too much.

If it’s the mark of a good thriller that you can’t recount more than a trace of the plot without spoiling it, The Good Father succeeds wholly. Where it is less successful is in the plausibility of some aspects of the plot and other elements of the novel. These shortcomings aren’t so much in the later parts of the novel where the plot piles on the sucker punches, although McIlvanney might have held back one or two of those for more focused impact.

It’s where a reader’s own imagination can match McIlvanney’s that he comes up wanting. It’s hard to believe that, even allowing for sometimes counterintuitive behaviour in moments of shock, a mother whose son has just gone missing would tell her husband she can’t again go through the three attempts at IVF it took to have him. A son as replaceable as a labrador. Or that she would stay at home when her husband goes to Glasgow to follow up a reported sighting of the boy, however disappointing previous raised hopes have proven.

And would a father in Rutherford’s situation really indulge in the following bit of gallows humour when pondering the possibility of his son having been swept out to sea? ‘I thought of Rory’s body turning whitely in the depths of the firth, nibbled by fishes and waiting to be netted by some poor bloke in yellow oilskins. Catch of the day.’

You’ll have to take some of the implausibilities on trust, because to talk about them would give too much away. The most problematic, because so much of the novel pivots on it, is McIlvanney’s conception of trauma as taking a linear, even logical, path, one more suited to the exigencies of his plot than to reality.

The psychology doesn’t always stack up in this psychological thriller. The grief isn’t all-enveloping enough. The mind works in more mysterious ways than McIlvanney manages to capture, or is prepared to give narrative space. You might argue this is to maintain the pace of the thriller aspects of the novel. But there are other, overwritten aspects that could have been trimmed comfortably. The novel is too often sidetracked by scenes that could have been half the length and in one instance by an entire sub-plot that’s mostly abandoned. Given the nature of the novel, it’s probably inappropriate to say McIlvanney would have benefited from killing his darlings, but nonetheless …

Some of those darlings suggest an expatriate’s nostalgia for home, McIlvanney rendering (and remembering?) Scottish life and landscapes in the lovingly layered brushstrokes of his sentences. It’s churlish to complain about too much of a good thing, but what’s a reviewer if not a churl? Longueurs slow a story down and make a thriller less thrilling.

McIlvanney’s now been in Dunedin since 2009. It could be time for a novel set in this country. The Good Father does make passing reference to Auckland and there’s a bedtime story that features New Zealand. Oh yes and a line about ‘Kaim bloody Hill’. Kaim Hill’s a real place (I checked). But McIlvanney is surely winking an eye at us there.

The Good Father is not exactly undone by its shortcomings – its strengths are too strong and too many for that. But, as Gordon Rutherford can testify, missteps do add up and take their toll.