The actor and comedian reconstructs the story of a relative who died at the Somme to quietly devastating effect
has developed a talent for mining his past. The first three published volumes of his diaries perfectly encapsulate the ebb and flow of a restless creative spirit. Released in 1991, the film American Friends, meanwhile, dealt with a chaste Oxford professor who found himself in a complicated holiday romance with an older American woman and her teenage daughter. The story was pulled straight from the diary of Palin’s great-grandfather, Edward.
Great-Uncle Harry represents Palin’s attempt to get to know this apparently unknowable man. Short on words and ill at ease in family photographs, Harry was the youngest of a huge and distinguished brood, and spent the first years of adulthood bumbling around the world in search of work. Handed a job on an Indian tea plantation, he was moved on after managers bemoaned his lack of effort and intelligence. Eventually he found employment in New Zealand, as a farmhand.
Palin fills his prewar accounts of Harry with mounds of supposition, tending to guess at his motivations. The Palins have always been a family of some distinction, stretching back to 1651 when Thomas Paylin helped hide King Charles II from Cromwell’s army. Reading the first half of this book, you sense a desire to elevate Harry. Where the tea plantation saw a lack of intelligence, Palin imagines a free spirit unconcerned with the conventional order of things.
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