By Michael Brissenden
Every life has some important landmarks, most of them are anticipated – getting married, having children, significant birthdays like turning 21 or 50 – or paying witness to the end of the Cold War and passing up the opportunity meet John le Carré, one of the greatest chroniclers of the era. But more on that later.
Some of these things hit you unexpectedly, they sneak up on you, they come at you like ghosts. That is how it is with me this year. This year I turned 63, the same age my father was when he died. This year I also published my third novel.
When my father Bob left us, he left a half-finished manuscript of his own. This too was his third novel. It was a tale of organised crime and drug running through the Balkans in those first months of post-Cold War chaos – freedom and optimism alongside rampant criminal opportunism, resurgent nationalism and social decay. He never got to finish it.
Michael Brissenden with his father Bob in Melbourne before they left for their overseas trip.
Eighteen months or so before he died, the two of us travelled together through the former Yugoslavia and on to Sicily on a long and thorough research trip. My father’s health was failing, Parkinson’s disease had robbed him of his independence, he knew this would be the last time he travelled overseas, and I sensed it might be the last opportunity we would have to spend saying some of the things a father and a child should say to each other.
Like many father-son relationships ours had had its ups and downs, its shared joys and misunderstandings. Fathers and sons are often not that good at talking – often better at doing. This was a way to share a task, to work together and through that maybe to find a way to reach something else.
Bob and one of his contacts at lunch in Ljubljana.
Before he turned his hand to fiction, Bob was first and foremost a poet and an academic. He had a lot of friends and contacts, and he was good at making new ones. My father was a good writer, but he was an even better talker, drinker and raconteur. He never passed up an opportunity to meet an old friend or engage with someone new. He loved parties, robust dinner tables and pubs – and he’d strike up conversation with anyone.
The people we met as we weaved our way down through the cities and towns of one of the world’s great fault lines were the poets and the writers, and the lecturers and students at the English departments at universities in places like Ljubljana, Zagreb and Split.
Over plates of grilled meat and plenty of Balkan wine, the talk was all about national identity and the potential of a new world – intoxicating stuff for a young journalist keenly aware that this was a significant moment in modern history.
But even as the recent past was being left behind, the ancient past was making itself felt. While the tanks hadn’t yet started to roll and the massacres and war crimes were still to come, the centuries of unresolved enmity were already staking a claim on the future.
Years later I would go back to these places as a correspondent when much of that hope and passion had turned to rubble and pain. For the moment, though, I had a plan. At the end of every day, we’d sit with a drink or two (or in his case three or four) and I would ask my father about his life. I had a little dictaphone to record our conversations but beyond that, I had no real idea what I would do with any of it. I still don’t, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to them since they were recorded.
‘I know I wanted to explore his motivations, his loves, his expectations – had they been met?’
Michael Brissenden
They’re sitting in a box on a bookshelf waiting – maybe I’ll get around to writing the big father-son road trip story one day but right now, more than 35 years on, it still doesn’t feel like the right time. Without listening to those tapes, I can’t recall exactly what the questions were that I asked him, but I know I wanted to explore his motivations, his loves, his expectations – had they been met? Had it been a good life? Did he have any regrets?
From the start, my father was a reluctant participant – he really didn’t want to talk about the past. He didn’t want to confront the fact that there may not be much of a future either. He just wanted to make the most of what he still had. We had a job to do. We had people to meet, we had leads to follow.
As we travelled, Dad read. He was always reading. He was a specialist in highbrow literature – the 18th century poets like Keats, Byron and Shelley – but he also loved reading crime and thrillers and in the last years of his life, that’s what he decided to write.
At that time of course I had no idea I would also follow that path. Hindsight being a thing and all that, it is to this day one of the great regrets of that trip that I didn’t.
Bob Brissenden on the ferry from Split to Ancona, Italy.
After we’d traversed a disintegrating Yugoslavia and spent some time in Sicily plotting smuggling routes and talking to the young lawyers working with the anti-Mafia crusader Giovanni Falcone, we ended our trip in London – a city my father loved. The Samuel Johnson quote about being tired of life if you ever tire of London was a favourite refrain.
Like I say, Bob had a lot of friends and acquaintances in the writing world. Maybe it was a smaller place back then or maybe just more collegiate and generous.
I really don’t know how he knew John le Carré, but whatever the case David Cornwell (as was his real name) was one of the friends he felt moved to go and see. Would I like to join him he asked?
John le Carré in London in 2019.Credit: New York Times
Keenly aware of his often reprised Johnson quote, I thought I could better use my time in London by getting a good hold of it. So I declined. I put my father in a taxi and sent him off to Hampstead.
To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have known what to say to le Carré anyway, but the shame is I can’t even remember what it was that I found more important – probably a long-forgotten band playing in a pub with sticky carpet and expensive beer.
It seems another world now, but also this year strangely fresh, like we’ve come full circle. In the last few months, I’ve found myself reflecting even more on our relationship, on writing milestones, on getting older.
What have I learnt after all this time?
The tapes of my clumsy attempts to mine the past are still sitting in the boxes, but really what I know now is what was happening in the moment back then was far more important – the experience and the purpose we shared, the meals we ate, the people we met.
And here’s a couple of other things time and age have taught me – if someone offers you the opportunity to meet one of the great writers and storytellers of your time, you should probably take it, but more importantly cherish the stories you have in front of you, hold your loved ones close and never say no to a road trip with your father.
Michael Brissenden’s crime thriller Smoke is out now through Affirm Press; RRP $34.99.