Loss of a beloved parent

I did not expect to read this book untouched, given it is about a brilliant, gentle, and unconventional man and father, David Sibelius, who is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when his daughter, Ada, is just twelve. Having majored in mathematics, at the age of 30, David is already the head of his own lab, which is studying machine learning of languages. David uses surrogacy to become a father, and is single parent to Ada, who is home schooled, very clever, and whose whole world is her father. She even goes with her father to work at his lab, is part of the team along with the other scientists and postdocs, and who helps out with ELIXIR, the machine they are all training.

Despite her book learning, her adult manners and sophistication for a 12 year old, Ada has no socialisation with children.

Ada’s behaviour around these children were absurd. When she got near them she drank them up. Sher took them in. She was silent. She watched them like a television show. She took note of every turn of phrase they used, Like, they said. Rad, prolly. No way. As if. Freaky. Whatsername. Hang out. What’s up? Duh. Creep. Freaked out. They were freaked out by her, probably. She didn’t blame them (p21).

But for all this, Ada is a very happy, contented girl, fully relying on her father’s devotion. She interacts with the adults in her world and gets a lot of support and validation from them. Most of all, she loves Liston, one of her dad’s first hires, and who helps David run his life. Liston, 16 years younger than David, helps David buy a house near her own, helps David mother Ada, has 4 children of her own, but finds time to look after Ada too.

When David’s Alzheimer’s becomes too advanced to have him continue living at home, he has to be put into a nursing home, and Ada joins Liston’s family, as she is only 14 at this stage, still 4 years shy of adulthood. Ada had already been enrolled into Queen of Angels, a catholic school Liston had put her own children into. Ada struggles at school at first, as can be imagined. She is strange, and an outsider, but she learns to keep her head down eventually, and makes no enemies, even if she is slow also to make friends.

In the privacy of her room, under cover of night, she sometimes practiced the mannerisms and dialect that she had seen children her own age using, Like, she whispered to herself. Um, totally. Whatever.

She longed, now, to be pretty. After weighing the evidence, she had recently decided that she was not, which in her former life, would not have mattered – in fact, David had always seemed to consider prettiness a detriment, something hampering and debilitating, like a tin can tied to one’s leg.

But at Queen of Angels, prettiness was all” (p130)

We watch Ada, aching for her as she takes on a whole new set of values so inferior from her own, from her natural longing to fit in and to belong somehow. We watch Ada not daring to shine, downgrading her own uniqueness and intelligence, or at least concealing it, so as not to get singled out for mockery and contempt. And we watch Ada, with her tremendous depth of understanding, trying to come to terms with losing her father as his memory and his mind deteriorates, and he recedes from her, from her life.

The deteriorating is rapid, within months David has lost most of his faculties, and within 2 years from Ada learning about his illness, he cannot even remember her name. The novel depicts the decline and the pain and frustration, for David as well as Ada. David is not ordinary to begin with, so his losses seem even bigger. From having been so gifted, so bright, so exacting, so discerning, so perfectionist, and so capable of appreciation of beauty and precision, he has lost all this mental treasure house, as well as his identity and his self. Some passages are so accurate, cut so close to the bone, one is hard pressed to read it without tears welling:

he seemed aware, somehow, of the importance of keeping his pride intact, a citadel, as his mental faculties crumbled around it” (p133).

The next section of the novel is all about the riddle of David Sibelius. In trying to get custody of Ada sorted out, it emerges that David may not be who he has claimed to be. Ada is both devastated and intrigued, warring with herself between anger at her father, and loyalty to him and the memory of all he was to her, before the Alzheimer’s took hold. Ada is also a teenager and struggling with moving in with a new family, into a new school, the loss of a parent who is not dead but not quite functioning either, and her own sense of lack and limitation. She lashes out in anger at times, even against Liston whom she loved but now feels mistrustful of. She makes different friendships with Liston’s 3 sons with whom she now shares a house. Ada keeps trying to unearth the mystery of who David Sibelius is.

Thankfully, the mystery is worth the suspense, and the suspense is built well and credibly. The bigger half of the book is given over to unravelling this mystery all the way into Ada’s adulthood. It is still excellent reading, but without the luminosity of the first section, about Ada and David and their life together. It seemed all too brief a period of such light and tenderness; which perhaps it was for Ada herself, just a handful of years to know her father and live with him and learn from him, before he was lost to her.

Liz Moore’s writing is a thing of joy at times, particularly in that first section of this novel. She is a storyteller who can spin a tale both memorable and charming. Her descriptions capture evocatively and with great observation

The 1980s marks the dawn of like as a sort of linguistic master key, a shapeless bendable word that fit into the crevices of sentences as perfectly as honey. The girls at Queen of Angels poured it over their speech greedily…” (p111)

Her writing alone makes me want to source all the books she has ever published.

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