Celebrating a family of originals

Book club choice Trapido’s eccentric brood are captivating and warmhearted, says Violet Hudson

Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido 256pp, Bloomsbury, £8.99, ebook £3.99

English literature has always kept a special place for eccentrics: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Shakespeare’s Prospero, Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, Mitford’s Uncle Matthew. We love quirks and queerness, be it violent tempers, strange passions or just independent thinking. Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982) by Barbara Trapido contains a whole family of eccentrics. Soignée 18-year-old Katherine comes across the academic Jacob Goldman and is soon welcomed into his rambling home and chaotic family. This is the kind of house where piles of books totter precariously over newborns’ cribs, where daffodils picked on verges are shoved into old jam jars and where large, delicious meals are served on cracked crockery.

The Goldmans celebrate originality and don’t respect arbitrary authority. In one passage, the insubordinate schoolboy Jonathan rages against his teacher’s request that he paraphrase a passage from Macbeth. “What’s the f------ good of paraphrasing it? It

sounds better the way it is… I said if he didn’t understand it he shouldn’t be doing it with us.”

Trapido grew up in South Africa during apartheid, which informed her later work, Frankie & Stankie (2003), but this, her first novel, is as English as they come. Like Mansfield Park and Brideshead Revisited, Brother

of the More Famous Jack is a story about falling in love with a whole family. Katherine is first drawn to the beautiful, mercurial Roger, the eldest of the six siblings. The relationship sours and she flees to Rome. But many years later Katherine is drawn again into the orbit of the idiosyncratic Goldman clan. “I am,” she says, “in general susceptible to style.”

This is the fiction equivalent of a brisk walk followed by a hot buttered crumpet: fresh, invigorating, comforting and heartening.