Albion's Story - Hardcover

Grenville, Kate

3.65

620 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151001227 ISBN 13: 9780151001224

Publisher: Harcourt, 1994

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Albion Gidley Singer: well schooled in upper-class Sydney, inheritor of his father's lucrative stationery goods business. An awkward lad, no good at the social games expected of him, he hides behind an assemblage of facts that he trots out, at length, to anyone who will listen.
Traumatized by the repugnancies of the world - hunger, poverty, the "underworld" of women - Albion barely manages to stomach the rituals that accompany initiation into manhood. And so, with scientific precision, he searches for a proper mate. He does not agonize over his choice, for he knows that in essence women are all the same, "nearly as interchangeable as the bricks in a wall."
Childbirth - that mysterious, unpleasant business - soon follows. His firstborn is Lilian, who proves to be the cruelest of jokes: "Nature had dealt Lilian a nasty blow in making her a female, but I was not going to be cheated of her. She was a chip off the old block in every respect but one, and I was going to make sure that one flaw did not spoil the rest of her."
As Lilian matures into a huge, inquiring, iron-willed young woman, "a piglet in a lace nightdress," her gender calls into question Albion's own sense of self, and the ongoing power struggle between father and daughter exacts a stiff toll on both of them.

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About the Author:

Kate Grenville is a contributor for the following Houghton Mifflin Company Title: Albion's Story

From Kirkus Reviews:

Australian Grenville triumphantly returns to the setting of her memorable debut novel (Lillian's Story, 1986) to trace the development of Lillian's father--a turn-of-the-century bourgeois whose public arrogance and private terrors wreak havoc on those he should have loved. ``This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen,'' Grenville's protagonist announces at the outset of his story, ``a man with a weakness for a good fact.'' Facts are indeed Singer's obsession, having proved invaluable in shielding him from his own unacceptable emotions: early yearnings to join his devoted mother's mysterious, silky world; the terror he felt from his distant, disapproving father; the confused encounters with the raunchy prostitutes and ``proper'' young women who populate his upper-middle-class bachelor's existence. Initially a tongue-tied social outcast, Singer uses his intellect to learn to navigate the world of human sociability: painstakingly recreating the facial tics that indicate emotion; relying on the Darwinian theory of natural selection in choosing a wife; and immersing himself in the careful, scientific management of his inherited stationery company. His success entitles him, in his own opinion, to scatter his seed among a bevy of prostitutes, regularly rape his wife until she has borne him an heir, constantly criticize his bright and rebellious daughter, and berate his disappointing son. Despite these satisfactions, by middle age the strictly disciplined existence of the successful paterfamilias has left Albion secretly bereft, feeling like ``a man in the act of turning into air.'' His true self finally emerges in the violent betrayal of his young daughter, Lillian--after which Albion Gidley Singer embraces, almost with relief, the loveless, solitary existence he always suspected he deserved. A masterful, sharp-tongued portrait of an individual and an age. Grenville's fiction is impossible to put down. (Author tour) -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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