I Know You’re Going to be Happy: A Story of Love and Betrayal, by Rupert Christiansen – review

This is an unsettling book. On the face of it a memoir by the opera critic of the Daily Telegraph, it veers from social history to intimate confessional, from objective understanding to subjective contempt, with strong elements of hatefulness.

In the summer of 1959 the author’s father, a prominent journalist and son of Arthur Christiansen, Beaverbrook’s great editor of the Daily Express, left the family to live with (and eventually to marry and have a family with) his secretary. What Christiansen describes in his book is the fall out from this act of betrayal. The subtitle includes ‘love’, which must refer to the son’s love for his mother.

Time’s arrow, travelling in the one direction, means that sons have the advantage over their fathers (when was the last no-holds-barred memoir by a father of his son?) and, as a rule, generally being dead, fathers have no right to reply. Here, so strong is the son’s sympathy for his mother and contempt for his father that the reader longs to hear the other side of the story. But after his parents’ divorce Christiansen never saw his father, and did not attempt to make contact in later life (Michael Christiansen died in 1984). It makes for the odd silence at the heart of the book. ‘It is as though I have locked a granite door,’ writes Christiansen in the midst of a rich paragraph of similes and metaphors emphasising the fact.

At the same time it is the picture of an eccentric, engaging man that emerges through the words of the father’s contemporaries. As editor of the Daily Mirror he hired John Pilger, tireless apologist for any enemy of the West, on the grounds that he was Australian and likely to be a useful spin bowler.