Adam Mars-Jones observes in this memoir of his late father, the redoubtable high court judge Sir William Mars-Jones, that when writing about the dead, “the writer, the survivor, has all the power”. As a novelist trained in the shady arts of fiction, Mars-Jones is well aware of the loaded nature of this exercise in turning the tables on authority. In the courtroom of biography the dead have “no redress against caricature or cheap insight” – and, just to raise the stakes, “feelings about parents are such primal things that it’s safer to assume you harbour any and every disreputable emotion”. Proceedings could get ugly.
Except that in Mars-Jones’s hands, the arraignment is somehow not just scrupulously fair but tender. The kid gloves of the title are an allusion to “the pair of white kid gloves trimmed with gold braid” traditionally presented to assize judges when there was no criminal case to be heard on a circuit, and Mars-Jones dons them with a delicate sense of filial irony. Mars-Jones Senior – ex-treasurer and bencher of Gray’s Inn – emerges as a bracingly complex figure, the son of a Welsh farmer who blended effortlessly into the ranks of the establishment; a temperamental conservative who could also take a defiantly liberal stance when the occasion demanded; an old fogey who played the guitar and loved the Beatles; an independent thinker who set great store by the baubles of conformism. (The son recalls the father doing battle with American Express about “how many of his honorifics – MBE, LLB – could be crammed on to his Gold Card”. After “tough negotiation” he finally settles for ‘Sir Wm’”).
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