The Spy Who Didn’t Love Me
By Chris Bourke

Daddy was a German Spy and other scandals: a memoir,
by Brian (Finbar Myram) Edwards (Penguin, $40).

If Brian Edwards’ father had moved in more exalted circles, this memoir could have been called “Lloyd George knew my father: but I didn’t.”
Daddy was a German Spy is a voyage around the father Edwards never knew, but also a voyage of discovery about himself. Both are enigmas over which he has puzzled all his life. He never quite achieves closure – not even an unmarked grave – but understands the need for the search.
We all need to know who we are and where we came from, but for Edwards it goes deeper. It’s about knowing the component parts that formed him. “It doesn’t matter all that much whether [his father] Arthur was a drunk, a wife-beater, a conman, a bigamist, a German spy. What matters is the DNA. What matters is having enough pieces of the jigsaw to recognise the whole picture – your own picture.”
When Edwards was two, he and his mother were abandoned by his father on the side of a road outside Belfast, in the middle of the night. His father had been married before and had many mistresses; his job as a commercial salesman in Northern Ireland gave him plenty of opportunity to create chaos, exploit it, and then leave the results. At the age of 13, Edwards writes to his father’s former employer to ask if they know his whereabouts. No, they reply, but if you do find him, let us know.
Often the opening chapters of a biography or memoir get bogged down in genealogy: the detail feels dutiful, while the reader wants to get on with the action. Edwards’ efforts to comprehend his complicated, elusive ancestry are written like a compelling detective story. His father used several different names, Edwards and Myram in particular. When choosing a name for baby Brian, his father selects the middle names, to his mother’s dismay. Finbar sounds Fenian, and as for Myram: “My mother disliked that name as well. It sounded Jewish. Though Jewish was at least preferable to Catholic.”
When Edwards is in his 40s, the search begins afresh. By then, he has two marriages behind him: he is conscious of similarities to his father, though luckily Edwards’ DNA lacks issues with alcohol or violence. His mother has always been defensive or evasive about the past, even on one of his final trips back to Belfast. “I was by then a radio and television interviewer of some reputation in New Zealand, but was no match for my mother, who ducked and weaved around my questions or directly avoided answering them by saying she couldn’t remember or it wasn’t important or, ‘Why on earth would you want to know that?’”
Eventually, through chasing up connections or by cold calling people using the phone book, Edwards makes some progress. Help comes from an enthusiastic elderly man called Robert Myram – the father he wished he’d had – and Edwards meets some cousins with memories of his father, even his own half-sister.
His complicated lineage untangled, Edwards moves smoothly into a subject he knows more about: himself. The memoir covers the years from that night of abandonment as a toddler to his graduation from university. He is wise to have stopped there, as including the New Zealand years of fame and infamy would detract from a moving, insightful and beautifully written account of a Northern Irish childhood in the 1940s and 1950s. This was when the Troubles were all behind closed doors: the intolerance, ignorance, violence, prejudice and poverty.
Growing up as the only child of a solo mother in that milieu was a handicap, and grim, but provides fertile material as he and his mother keep moving on to the next Dickensian digs. Will the landlady be a slattern? A snob? Will a fellow boarder have paedophiliac tendencies?
The insights are those Edwards has learnt about himself, as well as his environment. His anxieties, neuroses and fear of intimacy are linked to his errant, absent father, but also to his mother’s reaction to her situation.
Events such as his doctorate in German lit, his loss of virginity and immigration to New Zealand are all in the future. Nevertheless, Edwards – a public figure who guards his own privacy – reveals a lot about himself, perhaps to his own surprise. This thoroughly enjoyable memoir certainly explains why so many of his classic interviews began by asking guests about their childhood.

Footnote:
This review by musical historian/author/book reviewer/blogger Chris Bourke
(pic left) was first published in the Sunday Star Times, 12 October 2008 and is reproduced here with permission of both the writer and the newspaper. My thanks to them both.