Boy narrator

The boy narrator is the channel through which the family's story is told and the novel is written from his perspective in an autobiographical style. It opens in 1945 when the boy is apparently aged around 5 or 6 and concludes many years later after he has graduated from university. However, the story spans a much greater time period than this, as the boy pieces together his family history from the early 1920s onwards. We never learn the boy's first name, but a conversation he has with Crazy Joe reveals his family name to be Caliban. The boy is third eldest in a family of seven, later reduced to six by his younger sister's death.

This is a highly intelligent and academically gifted boy, who loves reading and who eventually earns distinctions in his end-of-school examinations and a first class degree. Although he does not favor participating in sports, he...