Like Wilde, Germaine Greer is a star, and the surface of her tragedy is that any product of her prodigious talent is likely to seem an offcut from an essence that manifests itself elsewhere (on television, in the papers), a refraction from a source of light than can never shine full on.

I don’t imagine it’s altogether fun having to live up to the Germaine Greer myth, though the stardom began in programmatic confessionalism twenty odd years ago with The Female Eunuch and the habit shows no sign of abating. Germaine Greer is one of the finest essayists on Earth and one of the better literary critics, but she is negligent of both skills and who can blame her? In a sphere where all the signifiers and signifieds are one, where style and self are coterminous, Germaine Greer has nowhere to rest her head; except on that interiority, that selfhood which she has made, and continues to make, intimately familiar to an audience of millions.

Hence the partial failure of most of what she does – the lurches between solipsism and wisdom, the journey work which she has set herself to master (and which she revisits on the reader almost like any other Cambridge dry-as-dust), the unstable hauteur (first youthful now dowager-like), the scientism that mars The Female Eunuch and Sex and Destiny, the plodding art criticism of The Obstacle Race, and the dogged scholarship of her Shakespeare monograph. Germaine Greer has all the qualities that distinguish the world’s great bores but she also has wit, compassion, and a capacity to mesmerise.

Daddy We Hardly Knew You might almost be a backward glance at how Athena sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus. It is Greer’s attempt to find out what significance her father might have for her; not, in the first instance, by going down into the abysm of childhood memory, still less of fleshing this out with the far more detailed memories of her younger brother or (God forbid) her despised mother. The most striking thing about the quest that led to the writing of Daddy We Hardly Knew You is that it seems to have begun in intuitions about the public facts of her father’s life rather than in any attempt to uncover the private man through recollected privacies – and Reg Greer was a man who was, by definition, less known to her than to any other member of her family. The implication, of course, is that only the great Germaine Greer would be able to pluck the heart out of her father’s mystery and she will be able to do so because she will nail down every jot and tittle that the his­torical records can yield. Part of the poignancy of this very odd book is that she succeeds in doing just that while ending up with her two hands round nothing.

Daddy We Hardly Knew You: the title is from the lachrymose old Irish ballad and perhaps Germaine Greer had it in mind from the outset. Certainly it tallies with the story (told more vividly to Clive James on television some years ago) of going with her mother as a little girl to the railway station to meet her father when he came back from the war.

The book we have is the telling and retelling of stories which would have no intrinsic interest if they had not provided further stepping stones in the progressive disillusionment of Germaine Greer. Of course no story has intrinsic interest and there is some­thing very affecting indeed about the spectacle of this overbearing dame setting out on an odyssey to recover the lineaments of her unmemorable dad’s life story. At its best, Daddy We Hardly Knew You has an extraordinary moral dignity which comes from the nakedness with which Greer dramatises her own compulsion to understand her father, to know the man from whom she comes. The quest has a fierceness which outstares misapprehension even as it invites the easy psycho­analytic sneer.

It also founders in futility and failed projection. After all, what roots could have been worthy of Germaine Greer? A tragic war that left her father a husk, incapable of expressing his love for her? She seems to have needed a particular family saga and when she failed to get it Reg Greer, the Daddy of her heart’s longing, became someone she could no longer imagine with any sympathy. Instead he emerges in the book’s final vision as an icon of distrust and fear, forever warding off the sharp-eyed daughter who might find him out.

I should add that the impressive, if idealised account of the ‘grand­mother’ she discovers could be imagined differently and presumably was experienced differently for her father to cover his traces so effectively. Greer seems to have invested so much sympathy in one version of her father that there is none left over for the shadowy bloke she hits up against and fails to fathom, even imaginatively. It takes a further imaginative leap on the reader’s part to realise that the foolish and warm­hearted harridan of this narrative both is and is not the woman who sits down at the typewriter to create the lucid prose which discloses the familiar features in such unremitting disarray.

Everything in Daddy We Hardly Knew You works to bridge that gap. It’s perhaps worth remarking that the portrait of the author’s mother, executed with apparent hatred, is a comic delight. Whether she’s remembered greeting the teenage Greer’s boyfriends with underpants on her head or lolling sarcastically on a gay beach as she hears about her late husband, it is Mrs Greer, not the supercilious-looking bloke on the cover, who comes to life.