Pagan's Father
by Michael Arditi
Throughout its first half, Pagan's Father simmers along quite nicely. Then, as the novel charges toward its final pages, it becomes a gut-churning, all-out potboiler, a story as outrageous and difficult to put down as its politely mannered preamble is to find quibbles with.
In the opening sections, British author Michael Arditi (The Celibate) crisply and efficiently etches the difficult—but none too shocking—case of a gay London talk show host, Leo Young, who, after raising a young girl—Pagan—along with the child's biological mother, is threatened with the removal of the child from his custody. The threat comes when the mother dies of a prolonged illness and her previously estranged septuagenarian parents resurface, hoping to spirit away their grandchild. The snippety, snobby grandparents at first seem presented as particularly crusty stereotypes.
Arditi's chronicle pleasantly, if predictably, ping-pongs as Leo's custody of Pagan is won, lost, challenged again and so forth. The action bubbles with topicality: sexual orientation, single parenthood, gender roles, and—most interestingly—media interference in personal lives. The latter is given a particularly smart twist here, since Leo himself is—while not quite a celebrity—a bonafide public figure. Arditi even includes editorial essays 'written by Leo' on gay rights in general and on gay parenting.
Socially-conscious readers will be moved along by the author's pleasant polemicizing. They will cozy up to the appealing character of Leo. They will be filled with a warm, simmering feeling.
And then all Hell boils over.
While the first half of Pagan's Father is the mild literary equivalent of potpourri on the stove, it also lulls readers senses before throwing them into the seething cauldron that follows.
Scenes of relative domestic bliss—in both Leo and the granparents' households—are blackened by accusations of sexual child abuse that begin to fly from both sides. Is Leo so intent on custody of Pagan that he is willing to make such charges on specious evidence? What are readers won over to sweet Leo to make of his fantasy-fueled attempt to kidnap the child and flee to the continent to escape British authorities. Arditi toys with our resistance to tabloid stereotypes, leading us to gnaw at the pages in genuine suspense, sometimes even prompting us to believe that we have been putty in the hands of perhaps unreliable narrator Leo.
There is also a remarkable supporting cast in the book's back end: a dotty former aristocrat, a wheelchair-bound secret informer, a pathetically lecherous old man and a transexual with a shocking revelation. One could call it a soap opera but for the fact that Arditi has given heft and reality to every superficially outrageous bubble.
At the center of it all, of course, is a tormented little seven-year-old ripped between two homes and two senses of identity. Arditi wisely chooses not to try seeing the world through a child's eyes and, particularly when Pagan gives cryptic intimations that she may have been abused, the reader must suffer with the same sense of furious, frustrated uncertainty shared by the girl's guardians and by the courts that deal with her cases.
As Pagan's Father moves from politesse toward pulp, it takes on a feverish urgency. Michael Arditi starts out by presenting compelling issues, he ends up offering a compelling story as well.
