I have just finished reading Benjamin Wood’s A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better (2018), a compelling, harrowing novel that explores the complicated terrain of father-son relationships. Set in the early 1990s, it follows an uneasy road trip from the Midlands to Leeds taken by Dan, a boy on the cusp of adolescence, and his father Francis, a man whose charm, duplicity, and volatile emotional state drive the narrative to a chilling climax. As someone called Francis myself, I felt strangely implicated, drawn in by the father’s desire for significance and recognition, his inability to communicate truthfully, and the emotional wreckage left in his wake.
This novel prompted me to reflect more widely on how father-son dynamics are portrayed in literature. Here are five things I believe we can learn from these portrayals, with Wood’s novel as the starting point.
1. Fathers often carry unhealed wounds from their own fathers
Wood’s novel traces a lineage of trauma. Dan’s father, Fran, is not simply cruel or unhinged: his behaviour is shaped by his own brutal upbringing. In one of the most disturbing episodes in the book, we visit Dan’s grandfather’s farm in Cumbria and witness firsthand the emotionally barren, abusive world in which Fran was raised. This recalls other literary depictions of inherited male trauma: Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), where ideological and emotional conflicts reflect generational estrangement, and Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907), in which the son must carve out a literary identity against the rigid piety of his evangelical father. The sins of the father, as the old phrase goes, are visited upon the son.
2. The desire for approval drives both father and son
In A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better, Dan’s longing for paternal approval is almost unbearable. His father, meanwhile, is desperate to be seen as important, talented, and beloved, even if it means lying to his son about working on a beloved sci-fi series called The Artifacts. This reciprocal yearning is a classic dynamic. In Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (1992), the narrator’s obsession with football becomes a proxy for expressing complicated feelings towards an absent father. The quest for approval often ends in disappointment, but literature gives us a way to name it.
3. Fathers are not gods: they lie, fail, and flounder
One of the great shocks in coming of age is the realisation that one’s father is not infallible. Wood explores this mercilessly. Fran is both seductive and monstrous, weaving webs of deception that gradually ensnare Dan and the reader alike. The novel plays with the tropes of science fiction, using The Artifex, a fictional TV show within the novel, as a kind of childlike mythos where wisdom might be gained from alien beings.
It reminded me of my own childhood attachment to Doctor Who, particularly the incarnation played by Jon Pertwee, followed by Tom Baker. Growing up with divorced parents and a troubled relationship with my own father, the Doctor became an idealised figure for me—a protector, a source of knowledge, and a stable presence across space and time. Pertwee’s Doctor, with his moral clarity, velvet jackets, and vintage and sci-fi cars, had a paternal charisma that offered comfort in a world that often felt unstable. He embodied a fantasy of what a father could be: eccentric, wise, brave, and consistent.
But Wood’s novel reminds us that the actual father can feel far more alien than any television alien. Fran is no Time Lord; he is fallible, narcissistic, and frightening. As with Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, where the protagonist’s destiny is tragically entangled with a father he does not know, the novel explores how the father figure is a mystery to be unravelled. And sometimes, as Dan discovers, that unravelling is catastrophic.
4. Masculinity is a performance taught from father to son
Fran performs masculinity through dominance, manipulation, and charm. He seduces women on the journey north, intimidates strangers, and exerts control over Dan, yet underneath it all is fear and insecurity. The novel invites us to ask: what kind of masculinity is being modelled? How is Dan being taught to be a man? Much like in Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden (1978) or even in Raymond Carver’s short stories, the absence or breakdown of healthy paternal models results in boys becoming men in distorted ways. The novel critiques the toxic scripts handed down through generations.
5. The father-son story is ultimately about identity
Who am I in relation to my father? Who can I become in his shadow or absence? These are the fundamental questions driving much of father-son fiction. Wood’s novel is ultimately about Dan’s attempt to survive and transcend his father’s legacy. We sense that storytelling itself becomes a means of doing so, a way of ordering trauma into something narratable. As Philip Roth suggests in Patrimony (1991), to write about one’s father is to write about oneself.
Reading A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better reminded me that fiction does not provide answers, but it gives us language for our deepest entanglements. And the father-son bond, perhaps more than any other, remains one of literature’s most intricate, painful, and revealing subjects.
References
Gosse, E. (1907) Father and Son. London: Heinemann.
Hornby, N. (1992) Fever Pitch. London: Victor Gollancz.
McEwan, I. (1978) The Cement Garden. London: Jonathan Cape.
Roth, P. (1991) Patrimony: A True Story. London: Jonathan Cape.
Sophocles (c.429 BCE) Oedipus Rex. Project Gutenberg.
Turgenev, I. (1862) Fathers and Sons. Project Gutenberg.
Wood, B. (2018) A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better. London: Scribner.
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