The Ship Mystery - Tom Stanley

The author of this collection of short pieces of auto-fiction is one of those middle-aged academics who, reaching an impasse in life and career, reaches back into past family life to seek a new way forward. The declining health of his elderly father provided the pretext: confronted by the challenges of care, the impulse to write suddenly became strong enough to be acted upon.This collection of ‘ego-tales’ is the result. More psychological than biographical, the tales are reflective fragments that explore the murky heartlands of an apparently straightforward family. Turns out, of course, that nothing is what it seems. Turns out they’ve been telling each other stories – stories which are not their own but dictated by a faceless family idol that draws them, unwittingly but inexorably, into a comfortable state of complacent non-existence.Existential and creative liberty are the opposite sides of the same coin, and you cannot have the one without the other. But where to begin when both seem alien qualities, entirely foreign to one’s being? The Ship Mystery is the expression of a disenchanted son’s frustrated efforts to find the liberty to dare to create.