Fatherless Sons: The Experience of New Zealand Men by Rex McCann

Published in NZ by HarperCollins $29.95

Reviewed by Peter Calder, the NZ Herald's writer at large.

Much of what it is to be a man we have learned from Rex McCann. Not the fine art of being a bloke - which, in moderation, has much to recommend it - but what blokes never learn because it is so threatening to our traditional notion of manhood.

McCann, an Auckland-based leader of men's groups, is an enormously skilful facilitator whose book is the distillation of more than a decade of thinking and talking about the secrets of men's hearts.

The title lays something of a false scent. McCann examines in somewhat disturbing detail the social cost of absent fathers: one child in three lives apart from his or her biological father and, in America at least, fatherlessness makes a boy 10 times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.

But fathers who are present can be absent too. Trapped in the role of provider, they often have nothing to share with their families but their frustration and bitterness at knowing, however vaguely, that there must be more than this.

Fatherhood has lost esteem in society, argues McCann. Fathers - take a look at the stereotypes in the television programmes which sketch out the shape of the world to our children - are often ridiculed and marginalised in the family, where women "own" the children. Single motherhood is, for some, a lifestyle choice; an adult male's passionate interest in his, or others', children is profoundly suspect.

But McCann does not act as a blind apologist for a victimised constituency. His book is a stirring challenge to men to connect - metaphorically or actually - with their own fathers and reinvent the relationship which ignites their sense of maleness. What is absent from our relationship with our own fathers, he demonstrates, is what prevents us from creating a healthy image of manhood in ourselves.

Fatherless Sons makes good use of the stories of men with whom McCann has worked over the years and he's generous too with his own memories of childhood - his father died at 49 and McCann find a telling symbolic resonance in our commonest cause of male death, "heart" disease. And, far from being a litany of complaint, it is rich in plans for action and challenges for the reform of social institutions - most urgently the Family Court.

Much of what McCann says here has been said before but the simplicity of expression, clarity of vision and local relevance that seeps from every page makes this an important book.

This review was first published in the New Zealand Herald.

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This book was published in Australia under the title
"On Their Own - Boys Growing Up Underfathered".

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