A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better

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As the novel ends, the implication is that the real achievement is to learn how to live with inevitable failure – as father, as husband, as man – and have the strength of character to try again, to fail again, to fail better. I understand I can change my preference through my account settings or unsubscribe directly from any marketing communications at any time. It’s 1995 when Kath is persuaded to let Fran take Daniel on a road trip to Leeds to see the set of a children’s series, Artifex, which Daniel loves. Exploring the bond between father and son and the persistent, purifying power of childhood trauma, A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better is an unsettling, evocative story of self-acceptance and reconciliation.

Lockdown and being furloughed from work has meant that I have more spare time than ever and therefore more time to read! In his early forties, he’s moved from the north-west of England to the south-east, where he lives with his family. What Sophocles actually says is: “When a god drives a man, and deceives him, he will decide that what is bad is good and live only a brief while outside disaster. Morley’s Elmet was a surprise Booker nomination last year, and hopefully this might make next Tuesday’s longlist.But with every passing mile, the layers of Fran s mendacity and desperation are exposed, pushing him to acts of violence that will define the rest of his son s life.

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A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better brilliantly reveals the process that leads up to that turn. If you don’t think you’ll read it but you want my opinions on it anyway, for some reason, or if you don’t mind knowing some details of the promised violence before opening the book, read on. Every phase of Fran’s moral slippage, from the false bonhomie and the phony assurances to the alarming upsurge of mania and muddle, is disquietingly registered. The novel begins and ends with Dan as an adult, still trying to make sense of what happened as his father first fails to care for him as promised and then drags him from one miserable situation to worse ones before finally losing all control and finally abandoning his son altogether.

The destination for their trip is Leeds, in particular the Yorkshire Television studios where the children’s TV series, The Artifex is being filmed. The gentle, steady incline up the tension stakes was tempered with vulnerability and behind this is the allure of those earlier words. W]ith his third novel, A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better, Wood’s talent has burgeoned spectacularly.

How what happened back in his childhood has taken over his life from that point, and it was something that was indeed big enough and important enough to do just that, but the way he hasn't dealt with things properly did sadden me and I really felt for him and mourned for the adult he could have been had things been different both during the trip and soon afterwards. His ex-wife, Kath, all too aware of Fran’s fecklessness, is wary about this trip, but Daniel, a lonely child who needs more in life than she can provide, is obsessed with the series and persuades her to let him go. Along the way, Francis’s temper and details of his philandering emerge, and he reacts violently when he and Daniel aren’t allowed onto the studio lot. What I got was, indeed, dark, but there is no question of redemption or forgiveness in A Station On the Path… In Francis Hardesty, a man whose temper, capacity for manipulation, and sense of entitlement drive him ever further towards acts of intimidation and murder, Benjamin Wood has created the scariest literary father since Daddy, of Fiona Mozley’s Elmet, or Martin Alveston of My Absolute Darling. I understood that he had finished being my father, as he had finished being a husband, and a stage carpenter, and painter-decorator, and a council maintenance worker, and a labourer, and a tomato picker, and a student, and a sheep farmer, and a son.