A review from the perspective of a bright 12-year-old boy who can identify with the bright 11-year-old English boy who narrates this novel and can judge how well the author represents people of their age and how well he tells his story.
What I liked about this book, “The Dead Fathers Club,” by Matt Haig, is that although it’s what they call an adult novel it is written just like an 11-year-old kid talks. I am not English like the boy in the book, Philip Noble, and I am a little bit older – 12 – but I can understand him very well.
I guess the author wanted to make it sound more like Philip talking by not putting in any commas or apostrophes or quotation marks or anything except periods. Anyway it’s good, and it doesn’t sound like a grown-up trying to be a kid except in a couple of places.
The story is about Philip and how he keeps seeing the ghost of his father, who just died in a car accident. Except his father, I mean the ghost, tells him it wasn’t an accident, he was killed by his brother Alan, who monkeyed with the car’s brakes because he owns a garage.
The ghost tells Philip he has to kill his Uncle Alan for revenge and to keep him from marrying his “Mum” – that’s his mom – and taking over the family pub. A pub is a bar or a tavern in England. He says Philip has to act
really fast or else he will forever be stuck in the Terrors, the place that members of the Dead Fathers Club go to if someone doesn’t avenge their murders before the “No time” is up.
As you can imagine, Philip gets really confused. Everybody at school makes fun of him for talking to himself because of course they can’t see the ghost, and his mother and uncle get upset at his weird behavior. His mum is kind of helpless from being sad over her husband’s death and is pretty much under the thumb of Uncle Alan.
Fortunately Philip has a friend, Leah, an older girl of 12 or 13. She’s pretty bossy and makes like Philip is her boyfriend, but I guess older women and younger men are in these days and anyway she kind of protects him.
Philip also has this neat teacher, Mrs. Fell, who helps him and seems sort of both happy and sad at the same time and is really pretty, you can tell from the way Philip gets excited over her. She’s wise, too, saying things like “if you speak to yourself people think you are mad but if you write the same things they think you are clever.” That’s British mad – crazy – not American mad, angry.
Another interesting thing is how many things are the same in England as they are in this country. For instance, Philip’s mum and her friend go to “Step class” where “they step on boxes for an hour to make their bums smaller.” Bums are what Brits call butts or rear ends, not homeless people.
When Philip and his mum go to the bank “all of the people looked very sad except the people behind the desk and the people in the banks posters and the banks leaflets.” That’s the same as here except in our banks, I don’t think the people behind the desks look very happy. Maybe English banks are nicer.
It says here “The Dead Fathers Club” is an update of William Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet.” I don’t know for sure except I watched the movie once on TV with my father and there were some things in there like in here. Especially Hamlet the prince who plots revenge on his uncle for killing his father and for marrying his mother real soon. Also the play has these two goofy guys, I forget their names, but they’re like these two twins in the book, Ross and Gary, who are always saying something weird, like they know something you don’t know.
I looked up the author of this book and it said he wrote another book called “The Last Family in England” and it was a “reworking” of another Shakespeare play, “Henry IV, Part I.” That seems like a good way to write books because somebody has already thought up your ideas for you and you only have to change the names, etc.
You’re probably wondering if the ghost was real and if Uncle Alan really murdered his brother. I’ll give you a hint: Turns out the book’s way more serious than it sounds, and near the end Philip says “You can’t trust anyone. Not the dead or the living.” If you want to know what happens next you’ll have to read the book.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book-review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
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The Dead Fathers Club
By Matt Haig
Viking, 328 pages, $23.95.
