Our Father

by Bernice Rubens

Near fine in a very good dustjacket (some wear to top edge of dj.) Hardcover first edition - New Delacorte,, (1987). Hardcover first edition -. Near fine in a very good dustjacket (some wear to top edge of dj.). First US printing. Victoria Glendenning described this book as "marvelous. It begins with quirky high comedy and gradually turns into something more frightening as Veronica faces up the repressed horror of her childhood." 212 pp.

212 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Bernice Rubens was born in Cardiff, Wales in July 1928. She began writing at the age of 35, when her children started nursery school. Her second novel, Madame Sousatzka (1962), was filmed by John Schlesinger filmed with Shirley MacLaine in the leading role in 1988. Her fourth novel, The Elected Member, won the 1970 Booker prize. She was shortlisted for the same prize again in 1978 for A Five Year Sentence. Her last novel, The Sergeants’ Tale, was published in 2003. She was an honorary vice-president of International PEN and served as a Booker judge in 1986. Bernice Rubens died in 2004 aged 76.

Reviews

[Adam Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was attracted to Our Father by the hideous painting on the cover and the whimsical nature of the first page. The cover contains a warning by Beryl Bainbridge, that the book will ‘haunt you’ and the shift between whimsicality and deeply nasty is a sudden one.

Veronica Smiles is 37, the same age as me but, at first, she is presented as someone on the brink of old age. She’s returning from a trip to a desert where she has met God, and finds herself agreeably chatted up on a train. It’s clear she’s socially isolated, she leaves her friends for long periods of time to explore deserts just as her mother explored mountains and her grandmother caves. As she gets closer to Boniface, the man from the train, she also meets God here and there and also explores her past via a draw of memories.

The treatment of God is very interesting, he’s almost always mundane, a person in the crowd. He’s a poor conversationalist and Veronica pities him for his neediness, that he’d ‘prostate himself for the merest soupçon of affection’ and is a ‘ubiquitous leech’. There’s a hard to place tone to the book, taking God as something normal and irritating - it becomes clear that he represents the itch of her conscience and that there’s significance in him being ‘our father’.

The book takes a swerve when she decides to marry Boniface but shags a plumber hours before the wedding. This is especially odd as Veronica is not a sexually outgoing woman, Boniface being her very first date who she lost her virginity to only weeks before. She then becomes pregnant, an impossibility because mumps rendered Boniface impotent but he takes it as a miracle. She says a number of times that she sees no future with an impotent man, even as she agrees to marry him, so is delighted (if scared) about the forthcoming baby.

In some ways this book is like Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, with a dark history that she has blocked from herself. I’m not a fan of this trope as it seems a very ‘plotty’ way to reveal a first-person’s secrets at the right time. Veronica’s past is dark indeed, after seeing her father’s affair and love-child, she murders the baby when she was just eleven, causing her father to kill himself. Her mother had also killed herself up a mountain after discovering the affair. So when a freak incident kills the baby in her womb she sees it as God’s justified revenge of her own crime, makes amends with those around her and sets off into the desert again.

The shocks in this book are shocking but undo the lovely tone from the beginning. It is haunting and well handled but a far less simply enjoyable book than I first took it for.

[Merrilie Rowley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite an extraordinary book. A quote from Beryl Bainbridge on the cover - "It will haunt you " and my word it did. The opening sentence " Veronica Smiles was crossing the desert, minding her own business, when she ran into God " was intriguing and things only got more interesting the more pages I read.
Very clever and very readable. Dark secrets revealed but written with such a deft touch. Fabulous.

[John Newcomb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Coming from a line of intrepid exploring women, Veronica meets god in the desert. There follows a number of further meetings with god in a variety of random places from Surbiton Market to her honeymoon, as Veronica tries to discover what god requires of her.
This is often amusing but also quite horrible at times. It is certainly an experience which is probably not worth repeating, but as a one off..................

[Jo vegan · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the strangest books I’ve ever read but I found it compelling enough to carry on reading. I read yesterday in the back lane by Bernice Rubens and both books are very dark but with humour interwoven .

[hannah 🫧🪩🤍 · Rating 4 out of 5]

this impressively witty book merges humour, absurdity, and darkness, to uniquely relay a story of confrontation and surrender, not only to God, but to her past.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Depending on the day, Rubens adds quite different ratios of tragedy and comedy into her books. At one extreme are those books like 'Spring Sonata', whose humour is molasses dripped into a vat of bile, deliciously dark though it is. These are the comi-trgaedies. At the other end you have books like 'Sunday Best', which is handfuls of daft candifloss drizzled with a soupcon of apple cider vinegar by a suspender-wearing Dick Emery. Those books are are tragi-comedies.

'Our Father' is one of the latter category, and one of the best of Rubens's I've read. There is an impressive hit rate of God jokes, told by a protagonist Desert-wanderer in her late 30s, who keeps meeting the incarnate in her daily life. This one is less Dick Emery, more 'The Life of Brian', with Veronica Smiles leaving Him in no doubt that He has been a very naughty boy.

It sounds like 'Our Father' should be awful. Perhaps it is. But I like you...

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Again not sure when I read this one as it was before 2000 when i started being a tad obsessed about recording my reading habits but think this has one of the more wonderfully enticing opening lines for a book; I quote

' Veronica Smiles was crossing the Sahara desert, minding her own business, when she ran into God. '

Bizarre, utterly bizarre but a great novel