Family divisions

The geological title of this unhappy memoir is an apt metaphor for fissures in the relationships between individuals of David Pryce-Jones’s extended family. Emotionally and financially competitive but interdependent, benefactors and beneficiaries, Jews and gentiles of various sexual proclivities are depicted grinding away against each other like so many incompatible tectonic plates.

Pryce-Jones offers a candid expression of filial impiety for which Eton, Oxford and the Brigade of Guards surely cannot be entirely to blame, although it is true that education far from home, from an early age, has been known to piss children off, as they say. Young boys banished to boarding school may feel tormented by Oedipal yearnings and resentment of paternal indifference. David portrays his father, the late Alan Pryce-Jones, as a distinguished litterateur, a handsome, charming, talented, sociable, parasitical homosexual who, from time to time, played the part of a heterosexual for the sake of domestic convenience.

David was born in Vienna in 1936. In his early childhood his parents delegated his care to servants. In the second world war it was his devoted nanny who guided him from France via Morocco and Portugal to safety. He inherited his father’s shrewd grasp of the literary and journalistic establishments and the social hierarchies of England and the continent. Their Welsh heritage seemed to fade.

David’s first novel, Owls and Satyrs, simultaneously disguises and reveals his perception of his father’s nature. ‘In this comedy of manners,’ he explains, ‘the main character is Alan, represented as a woman too preoccupied to pay attention to others. I did not want to hurt his feelings, and this fiction was the way to come to terms.’

The Fould-Springer family tree, the genealogy since the mid-19th century of a European Jewish family of great wealth and influence, diagrams the framework of the society that David shows riven by materialism and snobbishness.