The Boy with the Topknot
by Sathnam Sanghera
There is nothing about this book that yells at me to pick it up and read it. Not the cover, not the blurb. Nothing. Subtitled as “A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton” the back cover sells it as a trip down memory lane and hints at a few family skeletons. Big deal. Added to that, it was really difficult to find, so if wasn’t for the local Reading Group suggesting it as a title, I would have never even heard of it A shame really, because what the blurb fails to mention the one thing that held me throughout: mental illness.
Sathnam was in his mid twenties before he realised his father was taking medication for schizophrenia. This revelation takes him on a journey of research and discovery, learning that his sister also has the condition, developed while she revised for her school exams. But his main focus is his mother, and how she coped with her arranged marriage, domestic violence and life in a land where she couldn’t speak the language.
As a memoir, it is certainly engaging, deeply moving and peppered with humour. On the down side, Sathnam’s own neurosis never lets up. His internal debates and worries are an important element of the book because one of the main threads is Sathnam’s desire to get his mother to understand his own struggle of feeling trapped between worlds, and that his British side is equally as important to him as his Indian side, but it ends up becoming irritating and getting in the way of the characters you really want to know more about. I’m trying not to be too harsh on this point because the book is a personal memoir, and written subjectively, but at times he just irritates and overpowers everything in his path.
Overall, The Boy With the Topknot reads well and is a fascinating secret window on a world that would otherwise remain locked in its box, but on finishing, I couldn’t help feeling it would benefit from some heavy editing.
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