My Father's House

In 1960 Cambridge research student Bill Carr moved to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica to teach English. Within a few years he had become a well-known political and cultural personality on the island, immersing himself in the radical political currents that were transforming the region in the wake of independence. But behind the charismatic public figure lay a darker private life marked by alcoholism and domestic violence. Moving to Guyana in the late 60s, Bill Carr hoped to make a new start, but in less than a year his drinking and explosive violence had finally wrecked his marriage, and he banished his wife and four young children back to England.

Three decades later Matthew Carr returned to Guyana after his father's death to find out the truth about the man he hardly knew. He discovered that the white English academic who threw himself into the radical Black liberationist politics of the 60s and 70s was remembered with almost universal fondness, as a teacher, a husband, an actor, a cultural and literary figure and a larger-than-life character. But what was the relationship between the radical popular hero and the domestic bully? How could a man who behaved with such apparent generosity in his public life have treated his own family with such cruelty?

Through documents, letters and interviews, Matthew Carr tries to uncover the real person behind a shifting mass of myths and ambiguities. Part historical narrative, part travelogue and psychological investigation, "My Father's House" is the compelling story of a search into the past, a meditation on the nature of memory, and a brilliant and evocative account of the tempestuous world of post-colonial Caribbean culture and politics. It is a riveting portrait both of a man torn between creativity and self-destruction, and of the hopes, dreams and delusions of a vanished era.