The Dead Fathers Club: Matt Haig

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It’s a playful manhandling of Hamlet, and it works: The more you read, the more captivating it becomes. Philip is funny, vulnerable and resolute as he tries to shake off his grief and save his beloved dad from the Terrors and his mom from Uncle Alan. We suspect the Bard would be pleased. Anne Stephensen, The Arizona Republic Matt Haig’s prose is quirky, with no apostrophes, liberal use of capital letters, and some creative typesetting. He captures Philip’s young voice with its innocence and acceptance of a new reality. . . Haig has a deft descriptive touch. A church “smelt of God which is the smell of old paper.” When Philip reluctantly answers Uncle Alan, “In an invisible ice cube out of my mouth I said Yes.”. . . a poignant, original, often charming story of a boy struggling in sorrow and misery with all his heart. Marilyn Dahl, Shelf Awareness Lovers of Hamlet will savor The Dead Fathers Club. . .The Dead Fathers Club, at heart, is the wrenching story of a boy who can’t cope with his father’s death. He is 11 years old and powerless, not a prince with infinite charisma, and still the ghost keeps demanding that he show vindictive bravery. That Haig lets the problem overwhelm the boy so relentlessly gives the book its haunting power. . . The Hamlet-sized story doesn’t crush the innocent telling. In fact, in places, youth refreshes the older vision. . .in a climax in which Philip seems to overhear himself, he muses: “Dads are just men who have babies but I know he loved me because I felt it go out of me when he crashed. It was like air or blood or bones or something that made me me and it wasnt there any more and I had only half of it now and I didnt know if that was enough.” That last beautiful clause —“I didn’t know if that was enough”— achieves understanding while still preserving ambivalence. Its eloquence is hemmed tightly with doubt and fear. He is right: We never know if we have what it takes to make it through, and circumstances have forced him to learn this too young. It is irresistible to wonder if Haig chooses the protagonist’s age not only for its inherent vulnerability but also because another Hamlet–Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet — died at the age of 11. If so, “The Dead Fathers Club,” a tale of grief, holds a posthumous mirror up to the Bard, and offers him empathy. Todd Shy, News & Observer, Raleigh While I enjoyed Haig’s spin on the revenge tale, I actually found the most appealing part of the book to be Philip’s voice, especially the way he attempts to come to grip with the world around him. There are several gems throughout the book that might not be particularly insightful to adults, but which seem to perfectly capture the child’s evolving understanding of how the world works. If Hamlet were 11, he might write this. What I liked about this book, The Dead Fathers Club by Matt Haig, is that although it’s what they call an adult novel it is written just like an 11-year-old kid talks. I am not English like the boy in the book, Philip Noble, and I am a little bit older – 12 – but I can understand him very well. . .It’s good and it doesn’t sound like a grown-up trying to be a kid . . . Roger K Miller, Philadelphia Inquirer

What a very unique premise for a book this was. A young boy of eleven loses his father, only to be confronted by his ghost. Ghost Dad tells him that he must get revenge for his father's death, and haunts the boy until he starts getting himself into trouble. Of course, nobody else knows his dad is still around. It's hard to review this without giving the whole story away, but I don't want to start telling the whole story as I don't want to ruin it for anyone else! Philip – who has enough trouble just getting through the school day – now has only a months to figure out how to kill his uncle and set his father’s spirit free. It’s convenient, though, that there’s a bit of a Hamlet situation going on, as Alan, who clearly has designs on Philip’s mother, moves into their home and tries to take over as Surrogate Dad.The problem was, how do you find someone? Acting prodigies aside, how do you find a kid who can deliver a 7-hour narration of a book based on a Shakespearean play? And, oh yes, Ruben is American and the boy had to be British. With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels. Enlivening this remarkable novel from start to finish is the narrative voice of Philip himself. Lonely, misunderstood, but thoughtful beyond his years, Philip struggles to express his complex fears of both life and death in the journal that his school counselor encourages him to keep. As Matt Haig leads us to question the motives of Philip’s family and friends, as well as the true nature of Philip’s father’s ghost, he gradually evolves a brilliant contradictory portrait of his central character. Is he precociously philosophical or pathetically mad? Is he a foolish boy, or a fount of strange forbidden wisdom? Must he follow Hamlet’s destiny to the bitter end, or will he summon the courage to regain control of his fate? Not until the shattering conclusion do the deep mysteries of the story become clear.

Many of Haig’s characters, including Uncle Alan (Claudius), Philip’s mother (Gertrude), Leah (Ophelia), and Ross and Gary (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) have clear parallels in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Nevertheless, these characters have been reimagined with traits and motivations that distinguish them from their Shakespearean models. Choose a character from The Dead Fathers Club and reread the scenes involving that character’s counterpart in Hamlet. How has Haig altered the character? What do you think of these changes? Terry– He works with Uncle Alan in his garage. He chokes Phillip on Halloween night, he also revives Leah with Uncle Alan. The Dead Fathers Club is a wholly unusual reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But the Hamlet parallels — complete with similar plot twists — are worked in so deftly that the reader never quite anticipates where the book will go next. Readers see the world, surprising and strange, through Philip’s eyes. It’s a tangled web of murder and lies, with a boy caught in the middle, trying to make sense of it all. The result is a confused yet perceptive narrator whose responses to the world he inhabits are darkly humorous and sometimes tragic. Haig’s novel reads at a breathless pace (assisted by the absence of commas and apostrophes), his first-person narrative credibly that of a young British boy who takes things at face value. The result is a mysterious and engrossing book for both older children and adults — neither of which will be able to put it down. The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers, Spring 2007 Selection A. Anxiety is my main influence. I think, really, anxiety is the key mood at the beginning of the twenty-first century, so being a naturally anxious person helps capture that kind of feeling. Shakespeare is my most obvious literary influence, I suppose. I’m not a natural fan of authors who refuse to use apostrophes but Matt Haig’s Hamlet-esque Dead Fathers Club, narrated by an 11-year-old, somehow gains piquancy from it. This is the story of Philip, whose late dad appears as a ghost and tells the boy that he was murdered by Uncle Alan. Philip must now avenge him by killing Uncle Alan. And he has to do it before his father’s birthday in a few weeks, otherwise Dad’s ghost will be condemned to haunt the pub car park forever. Phil Hogan, The Observer

Beyond the Book

Nan– She is a minor character that is the mother of Phillip’s mother. She is disapproving of Carol’s precocious marriage to Alan. In a famous essay, T. S. Eliot complained that Hamlet was artistically flawed because the hero’s emotions were in excess of the factual situation in which he found himself. Does Haig’s retelling of the story give Philip sufficient motives for his extreme conduct? Do you find Philip believable as a character? Why or why not? In your opinion, how important is it to your readers’ enjoyment that they have read or reread Hamlet recently? What the child's perspective does, however, is bring the family power struggles to the fore. Uncle Alan attempts to worm his way into Philip's affections and his mother's bed; suspected of boiling Philip's tropical fish, he is alluring and frightening by turns, a figure of threat overspilling with treats and bribes. The pub itself, with its staff and regulars (Ross and Gary are a pair of particularly sinister Rosencrantz and Guildenstern doppelgangers), becomes a palace of whispering intrigue and conspiracy, as dangerous as any Elsinore. The child's perspective also brings out the absurd comedy of Shakespeare's tragedy; most of all it allows Haig to indulge his innocently acute eye for detail and his delightfully weird imagination. One's heart goes out to a boy torn between a selfish ghost ("If you ever loved me . . .") and a foolish mother, and one naturally fears for him, knowing the fate of the first Hamlet. But Haig borrows from Shakespeare in the same spirit that Shakespeare borrowed from his own sources. One is never sure where the story is going next, and that's what makes this book such sad fun.