My father, the tyrant: Robert Edric describes a brutal upbringing

In a career stretching back to the mid-1980s, Robert Edric has so far managed a grand total of 28 novels, plus a couple of early efforts under his birth name, G.E. Armitage. I must have read two thirds of this shelf-distending oeuvre, but in none of them have I ever detected the faintest whiff of disguised autobiography. Whether writing about early-Victorian Lakeland, in the 2006 Booker-longlisted Casting the Waters, or reanimating the career of P.T. Barnum (In the Days of the American Museum, 1990), Edric has always worn his detachment, his absolute reluctance to say anything about the person he is, or was, like a rosette.

All this makes My Own Worst Enemy, an account of his immensely tough upbringing in the shadow of the Sheffield steel factories, rather a departure. It is as if Henry James had just favoured us all with a journal of his sexual fantasies, or T.S. Eliot invited us to inspect the contents of his fridge.

Edric was born in 1956 in the nearby village of Ecclesfield, but moved to the city centre at the age of six. Both locales are nicely evoked, but looming over them is the terrifying figure of his father, who tyrannises over his wife and children like a medieval despot while subjecting each of his four dependents to an all-out war of psychological attrition.

Edric père turns out to be a belittler, a condescender, a scoffer and, worse, a violent alcoholic. At Christmas, the one season in the year that allows for some faint relaxation of the rules, the drinks order weighs in at several hundred cans of beer — and a bottle of Advocaat ‘for the ladies’. He was, essentially, a bully, his son deduces, and the life he led an endless competition, ‘everything a judgment concluded by a condemnation’, the whole performance — and Edric catches the theatrical element in this — sustained by an elemental capriciousness.