Thomson's choices

David Thomson's new memoir looks back to a childhood lit by movies and a father who might as well not have been there at all. (National)

This is a coming-of-age story that will make sense to other cineastes. Left to figure out the world for himself, the young Thomson turned to movies, jazz and cricket, and his memoir calls back to life the films, music and sports of a London that has disappeared. Many of the best sections of the book deal with movies and music, and that makes sense; Thomson is a critic. His memoir echoes a recent film, Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City, a documentary about the director’s youth in Liverpool. Of Time and the City is an aggrieved work, narrated in tones of extreme disdain, but in Try to Tell the Story, Thomson for once leaves bitterness behind, to see the past more clearly. Davies stayed in England; Thomson eventually left for America. Even before he went away, Thomson left his past behind by trading his father’s shadow for the shadows on the screen.