What Book to Read?

When I recently reviewed The Market in Babies: Stories of Australian Adoption, by Marian Quartly et al. (2013), I concentrated on its underlying argument: the supply of and demand for babies for adoption. I didn’t spend a lot of time on the stories told by the adoptees; they speak for themselves. The Magician’s Son (2005) is another such story. It is McCutcheon’s autobiography and in it, he tells how he spent years trying to come to terms with the fact of his adoption.

When he was nine years old, Sandy McCutcheon was told by another child that he was adopted, and this was confirmed by the child’s parents. His adoptive parents, however, initially denied it and then refused to give him any details about his birth family. His adoptive parents were members of the comfortable, conservative, professional middle class of Christchurch, New Zealand. They provided Sandy with many material comforts, but not, he felt, the love that he craved. As soon as he was told about the adoption, he knew it was true, because he never felt that he belonged in his family. He was never comfortable with his name; it ‘felt like an ill-fitting skin, one that needed to be shed.’ ‘It was only with hindsight,’ he says, ‘that I understood how traumatised I must have been at the time. The building blocks of my personality had been shattered’. His sole option, he felt, was to rebel, as  ‘the only way I have of validating my existence’. His whole life became ‘a search for identity’.

The structure of the book reflects McCutcheon’s preoccupation with his adoption. It is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the time before he met members of his birth family at the age of 50, the second dealing with the time after. Some readers may remember Sandy McCutcheon as the presenter of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s very successful radio program Australia Talks Back (1992 -2006) (later Australia Talks, 2007-11). As well as working in radio, he was an actor, ran a restaurant, wrote several novels and many plays and was the founder of a Buddhist centre for people in need in Tasmania.  He notes that he was attracted to jobs where he could appear to be ‘someone other than who I was’. His personal life was even more unsettled; he had a number of relationships that failed, leaving him with a further sense of loss. ‘The neurosis that had been set up by my abandonment as a child,’ he says, led to the feeling that ‘if I was not worthy of being loved by my own mother, then I was not worthy of being loved by anyone.’ As it is an autobiography, we do not get the views of his various partners, but it is clear that he can’t have been easy to live with.

All through his life, McCutcheon kept searching for anything or anyone who could tell him about where he really came from. Despite the unhappiness of his childhood, he hadn’t completely lost touch with his adoptive family. During a visit to his sister and his ailing mother in New Zealand, his sister – who had also been adopted by the McCutcheons, but had never felt angry about it as Sandy did – gave him some papers she had found relating to his adoption. They gave his birth name. From there, he discovered he had a brother and sister, and later, a large extended family. His mother and father were both dead, so the circumstances of his adoption were never fully confirmed. But it seemed that when his mother and father separated, his two elder siblings went with their father, while he remained with his mother. But when she remarried, she gave him up for adoption. By this time, he was about two years old, and though it seems unlikely that he could remember that his birth father used to do magic tricks, he nevertheless later dreamed that his father was a magician – giving the book its title.

Life for McCutcheon’s birth brother and sister became very difficult when their father married a woman who mistreated them. But McCutcheon says that he would have preferred to share that mistreatment with them rather than being adopted. Once he knew who he was, he grew in ‘tranquillity and contentment’. His birth sister, however, had a different view. ‘Anything would have been better than the life we endured,’ she writes in an Afterword. ‘When I listen to Sandy tell of his life I think [adoption] might have been the better option.’ Perhaps if the McCutcheons had told Sandy from the outset that he was adopted, he would have dealt with it better, but, as he acknowledges, this would have been hard to do, given the time and place. McCutcheon has certainly judged his adoptive parents harshly, but readers may find it harder do so.

There is a Postscript that was added while the book was in the process of publication. It explains what happened in relation to one aspect of the story that left me feeling uncomfortable. ‘Were my life story a work of fiction,’ McCutcheon writes, ‘an editor would have put a pen through this postscript, citing lack of credibility.’ I am glad the issue is resolved, but am left muttering that life can be stranger than fiction.

You can read more about Sandy McCutcheon here, including the titles of his novels. He now lives at least part of the time in Morocco, and this is his blog about the town of Fez where he has a house.