Who are the worst fathers in literature? Our consultants make the robust name

Literature has lengthy portrayed messed-up households. As poet Philip Larkin famously wrote, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.”

In honour of this wealthy vein of dysfunction, we requested consultants to appoint the worst literary fathers and moms. Today we delve into dads. Tomorrow, we flip to moms.

Of course, complicated characters – neither wholly good nor unhealthy – are the very best type. Author Andrew O’Hagan has spoken eloquently about striving to humanise even his most disagreeable creations, to completely amplify a novel.

Still, some characters are awfully exhausting to love. My least favorite dad could be Shug Bain, a merciless, violent man who abandons his spouse and youngsters in Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning novel. Shug is appalled by his son Shuggie’s female mannerisms. “Look how twisted you’ve made him,” he tells his spouse.

Here are our consultants’ picks.

James Mortmain, I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith

Perhaps the worst guardian will not be an apparent “monster”, however one you possibly can all too simply think about as your individual. In Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle, James Mortmain, a once-successful author within the grip of decade-long author’s block, threatens his first spouse with a cake knife and assaults a neighbour. His youthful daughter, Cassandra, softens Mortmain’s awfulness with disarming humour. In courtroom, she writes, everybody was being very humorous, however “Father made the mistake of being funnier than the judge … he was sent to prison for three months.” The self-focused Mortmain condemns his household to penury in a crumbling citadel, the place he reads detective novels within the gatehouse and Cassandra captures their plight in her journal.

– Carol Lefevre

Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

For me, Heathcliff even beats bad-dads King Lear and Agamemnon. Most readers gained’t keep in mind that Heathcliff is a dad in any respect, which is a part of what makes him so unhealthy. The sadistic, dysfunctional ardour between Heathcliff and Catherine dominates Brontë’s novel, leaving younger Linton, the child Heathcliff has with one other lady, Isabella, uncared for, abused and dominated by his terrifying father.

Heathcliff doesn’t even meet his son till he’s 13, after Isabella dies. Linton is then pressured to dwell in tormented isolation and tortured into marrying his first cousin, Cathy. All this so Heathcliff can take revenge on Cathy’s father Edgar, who married his beloved Catherine Earnshaw.

– Sophie Gee

Zeus, the Iliad

Zeus wakes up in guide 15 of the Iliad, having been lulled to sleep by Hera with intercourse and potions. Poor Zeus – together with his sneaky spouse, bickering, divine siblings and kids, all attempting to control the battle at Troy – and he’s solely attempting to maintain the Olympian present on the street. Seriously? Who began the household video games? And, if he had canned the swan costume and never raped Leda (or the handfuls of different nymphs he “manifested himself” to), no Helen, no battle, no issues.

He actually is the paterfamilias of poisonous patriarchy.

– Robert Phiddian

Reunion – John Cheever

The final time you see your father, I hope he isn’t drunk on Beefeater Gibsons. I hope he doesn’t clap on the wait workers or demand they converse languages they have no idea. I hope he doesn’t get you faraway from 4 eating places in a single afternoon. Walking away as he curses at a newsstand clerk, I hope you don’t mourn his flaws as “your future and your doom”. But, have been this all to happen, I hope it’s taking place inside a John Cheever story, the place the comedian and tragic combine like flesh and blood, or gin and vermouth.

– Alex Cothren

Kev, Last Ride – Denise Young

I’m not in favour of binaries of any form, so I’m not snug with “best” vs “worst”. Rather, I contribute a father determine from Australian literature who could also be each/and greatest/worst. I’m considering of Kev, the daddy in Denise Young’s astonishingly transferring novel, Last Ride, who takes his ten-year previous son, Chook, with him on the run from the legislation throughout outback NSW after committing a brutal homicide. Kev is among the many worst, as a result of: who would drag a child into that? But Kev is concurrently among the many greatest, as a result of his love for Chook, and his deep-seated impulse to guard him from one other man’s abuse, is as real and transferring because the paternal intuition will get. Kev wields fatherhood as double-edged sword. I really feel for him.

– Julienne van Loon

Albion Gidley Singer, Dark Places – Kate Grenville

The worst father in literature is a simple one for me, although it has been a long time since I’ve learn his story. I first encountered the incestuous father Albion Gidley Singer in Kate Grenville’s novel Lilian’s Story, during which he’s a considerably shadowy however menacing determine. But it’s in Dark Places that Albion’s evil is introduced absolutely to bear. I can’t keep in mind the main points of the guide, however I can keep in mind all too effectively the sensation of suffocation that got here from being too near Albion, to his ideas and his emotions. An incredible guide I by no means wish to learn once more.

– Natalie Kon-yu

Sam Pollit, The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead

In Christina Stead’s exhilarating and suffocating semi-autobiographical The Man Who Loved Children, the naturalist and patriarch Sam Pollit is nicknamed by his spouse Henny “the Great Mouthpiece” for his countless maxims and sickening Pollit-“fambly” patois. He claims to like his many kids however mocks, cajoles, and insults them; even has them spy on one another. Family life is so unhealthy that the novel’s heroine, the adolescent Louisa, believes her solely hope of escape from the squalor and tyranny is thru homicide.

– Jane Messer

My decide is a towering determine in Australian fiction: Sam Pollit of Christina Stead’s 1940 masterpiece The Man Who Loved Children. Sam’s oppressive sunniness, his maniacal refusal to look actuality within the face, and his demand that his household play alongside together with his ego-fantasy drive them to soak up cruelty, mockery and contempt, all of the whereas descending into an increasing number of perilous poverty at his arms. He is a modern-day narcissist par excellence, but in addition a grotesquerie or travesty of optimism as a advantage on this planet. In Sam, “positivity” is remodeled into harmful and delusional considering that steamrolls every little thing earlier than it and leaves destruction in its wake.

– Edwina Preston

Allie Fox, The Mosquito Coast – Paul Theroux

Charismatic, sensible and narcissistic, Allie Fox drags his household off to dwell in an remoted a part of Honduras’ Mosquito Coast to flee what he has persuaded himself is the approaching finish of the world. Like any colonist, he takes over a village and makes an attempt to introduce Western expertise and concepts. It all ends in disaster in fact, and his spouse and kids barely escape with their lives. Allie is the exemplar of the charming destroyer and is on the prime of my “bad dad” record.

– Jen Webb

Captain Ahab, Moby-Dick – Herman Melville

Herman Melville, an incredible American writer, was a lamentable father and an erratic supplier for his household, who drove his son Malcolm to shoot himself in his bed room in his mother and father’ home in 1867 after a row in regards to the 18-year-old’s late hours. Melville’s fictional character Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick behaves much more reprehensibly, abandoning his personal spouse and son to focus obsessively on a doomed quest for a white whale that finally leads his complete crew to destruction. Ahab takes his identify from the worst king of Israel within the Old Testament, and the writer of this epic novel trains his gaze not simply on one unhealthy father, however the entire nature of patriarchy.

– Paul Giles

Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

The worst father in fiction needs to be one of many first fathers within the horror style, the eponymous determine in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Victor, in fact, doesn’t beget the monstrous creature through the standard technique of procreating with a feminine, and he fashions his notorious progeny out of corpses, however he’s very a lot a horrible dad when he denies his ghastly son his love. The Swiss medical genius is the true Gothic monster right here, not the hapless and unpleasant creature who simply desires to be liked.

– Ali Alizadeh

My expensive Victor,

I ought to handle you Father, however how can I? I shouldn’t have your individual creator’s Miltonic energy to throw ethical injunction at you, as Satan did to God: “Did I request thee … from darkness to promote me?” Was there ever a son whose “being” (your individual phrase) will not be named however de-named as monster, dreaded spectre, fiend, vile insect, abhorred satan? I’ve entered literature as a hideous progeny, as an abortion and an anomaly. You by no means gave me love however don’t forget, Father, that my type is “a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance”.

Your son.

– Vijay Mishra

The novel’s horror is ready in movement not simply by Victor’s transgressive hubris as a scientist, but in addition by his refusal to just accept accountability. Victor abandons his “monster” at virtually the second after its beginning, and repeatedly rejects its appeals for compassion and empathy. Victor’s makes an attempt to disavow his legacy are finally futile, as his creation relentlessly pursues his “father” to the tip of his days.

– Julian Novitz

Thomas Sutpen, William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom!

“They feared him and they hated him because of his ruthlessness.” Thomas Sutpen is actually one among William Faulkner’s most terrifying creations: a person who arrives in Mississippi with nothing and wills a dynasty into being. Everything – his marriage, his kids, his land – is subsumed by his amoral “design,” which he pursues at any value and with no concern for many who get in his approach.

When a hidden truth about his first marriage involves gentle, he casts apart his spouse and youngster, setting in movement a cycle of vengeance that consumes the Sutpen line. In Faulkner’s arms, this ghastly patriarch finally turns into a determine for the antebellum South itself – constructed on inhumanity, colonialism and slavery, unwilling to reckon with the horrors of the fact it has introduced into being.

– Alexander Howard

Do you will have a nomination for the worst father – or mom – in literature? If so, tell us by scrolling to the tip of this text and including your alternative within the feedback.