Book Review: ‘The Whole Staggering Mystery,’ by Sylvia Brownrigg

THE WHOLE STAGGERING MYSTERY: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found, by Sylvia Brownrigg

In the opening pages of “The Whole Staggering Mystery,” Sylvia Brownrigg makes a case for memoir in the age of the genome. Now that mysteries of lineage can be solved via quick DNA test, “family secrets,” she writes, “aren’t what they used to be.”

We turn to the genre, suggests Brownrigg, a touch defensively, to get at what genetics can’t tell us — that is, “how it felt.” It’s an anxious note in an otherwise assured piece of storytelling about which Brownrigg needn’t have worried; her tale is an absolute banger.

Brownrigg’s father, Nick, who left the family when she was a baby and with whom she had only sporadic contact until adulthood, had, if not a secret life exactly, then origins that were highly mysterious. To his daughter, Nick Brownrigg was a “burly, jovial, blue-jeaned American with a large head” and beard, who, depending on his mood and how much booze was in him, could suggest either “Hemingway or Santa Claus.”

He was someone else, too, a person so improbable that his children had no idea what to do with it: Sir Nicholas G. Brownrigg, sort-of aristocrat, heir to a baronetcy created in 1816 when his antecedent, Gen. Sir Robert Brownrigg, did something considered heroic by the British in Sri Lanka. Two hundred years later we meet the fifth baronet living off the grid on a ranch in Northern California. It is his daughter’s self-imposed task, in the wake of Nick’s death, to integrate the two versions of her father.

It should be said that a baronet in the family, even a hippie dropout, isn’t enough to carry a story even if the idea of the title — one up from a knight and two down from a viscount, for those still keeping score — goes a lot further in California than England. Deliciously, Brownrigg quotes a Los Angeles Times headline that ran in 1939 on the death of her great-grandfather: “Pasadena Boy, 7, to Receive Title of English Baronet.”

But the lapsed title — which came with no land, estate or privileges — is just the start of an exuberant yarn that uncovers Nick’s estrangement from his family, his parents’ divorce, the death of his English father and the return of Lucia, his Austro-American mother, to Pasadena. Lucia raised her son to believe his father’s family had rejected him.

Bar the odd cryptic remark and a passing interest in his father’s ambitions as a writer, the author tells us, Nick behaved as if none of this history existed. To that extent, “The Whole Staggering Mystery” is both quintessentially American (a tale of reinvention) and English (a study in avoidance).

By uncovering Nick’s origins, Brownrigg hopes to shed light on her father’s arm’s-length attitude toward his own kids, as well as his apparent indifference to his English family. Brownrigg is by background a novelist, and some way into the book, she veers from memoir into fiction. This is a risky move. But, while the fictionalization of her grandfather’s experience in 1930s Kenya feels a bit cursory and labored, Brownrigg’s childhood adventures at her dad’s ranch practically leap off the page.

I could’ve read a whole book on the Circle C, described by the author as “80 forested acres reached after an hourlong dirt road drive from the logging town of Ukiah,” to which Nick moved in the 1970s with his trouper of a second wife, Valerie. Here the pair survived for 29 years with no electricity or hot water.

Nick would drink, then dry out. His daughter and son occasionally visited, oozing ambivalence about the ranch and their dad. “Nice but neglectful” is how Brownrigg characterizes relationships between the generations, adding, “It’s a more common combination than people might think in families.”

The central drama of the book, however, remains the mystery of why the Brownriggs lost touch with their American heir. Were they just horrible, chilly people with no heart?

Unusually in this kind of story, there is a smoking gun in the form of a scrapbook, assembled in 1939 by Nick’s grandmother Beatrice, which she intended her California grandson to read when he came of age. In reality, through a combination of avoidance, mismanagement, the Second World War, and all the indistinct grudges and misunderstandings of families separated by culture and distance, Nick would not open the book until 2016, when he was 83 and dying of cancer.

Even so, the story isn’t clear-cut. What I love about this memoir is how ably it gets at something very complicated indeed: the way in which, over generations and in the face of good intentions, family bonds can loosen and die. It’s dreadfully sad, and yet through Brownrigg’s sleuthing, something touching is redeemed. In her “Book for Nicholas,” Beatrice writes in the hope of persuading her lost grandson that his father’s family didn’t abandon him. “I think of you with love,” she writes, “and pray that every blessing in life may be yours. Your loving grandmother, Beatrice Brownrigg.”

THE WHOLE STAGGERING MYSTERY: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found | By Sylvia Brownrigg | Counterpoint | 336 pp. | $34.99