Historically, Clark will be seen as having his affinity with the mid-century actors of the antipodean imagination: with Patrick White, though his achievement is not of the same order; with A.D. Hope and James McAuley, though his embrace is wider and warmer. Like them, he is a myth­maker and a bardic post-colonial trying to make a House of Many Mansions out of an old bark hut and succeeding (this side of pretension) because the imagination builds its own structure and weaves what winds it may.

More even than White, Clark’s story is one of moral conquest in the face of natural debility. He is far from being a born writer, and the Braudels might not have had much time for his historical equipment, but he is far and away our greatest historian, almost because he was chosen to be. The Puzzles of Childhood is the first step in a history of how that journey came to be made and of the frail boy who made it.

There is no emphasis on the courage of the self in this warm but piteous book which delineates in a manner both rhetorical and unrelenting the genealogy of a mummy’s boy.

Manning Clark was born in 1915 into a position of social marginality. His father was an Anglican priest who came from a respectable working-class family, but his mother was an Australian patrician (no less vehement for the contradiction in terms), a descendant of that turbulent priest and flagellationist, Samuel Marsden. Clark’s father was a fruity fellow, obsessed by the slights which were visited upon him even though his histrionic priesthood constantly spoke out of a sense of reverence for the Man who walked by the waters of Galilee and who said that much would be forgiven the woman who had loved much. When I heard some first drafts of this memoir delivered as the Scott lectures at Ormond College last year, it was the father’s story that flamed into life. ‘God spare me days, woman, may I not speak to my son in my own house?’ The incessant iteration of ’Boy’. He never managed to live up to the promise of his own richness whether as a human being or as a parent, though he implanted the fascination with the mystery that continues to haunt his agnostic son.

Yet in the pages of The Puzzles of Childhood (a more frail though not a less impressive performance) it is the mother who dominates or who at any rate insinuates a counterpoint as silvery and sad as the father’s story is resonant and hyperbolic.

The mother was the inheritor of Protestant properties where the father seems to have had a natural affinity for the ritual and plangency of Catholicism (though he was not straitjacketed by pastors for whom the cross itself was an ostentatious icon). The mother was locked into a lifelong union with a man from a walk of life she thought vulgar, who loved a drink, who loved the down and outs he mocked, and who was reduced to social torment when his social superiors despised him, when he failed to get the applause which he needed like a Eucharist or daily bread.

All the time, mother used to call her fragile darling ‘Mann, dear’. ‘Mann, dear, there are things about my life I hope you never know.’ Mrs Clark lacked her husband’s histrionic sense of betrayal, nor did she seek revenge. But she thought life’s unfortunates, the sinners in their Sodoms, were ‘peculiar’. She could not be a Madonna to anyone who was irregular or told untruths. In fact, ‘peculiarity’, both her own and that of her special little boy, seem to have been obsessions for her: ‘Mann, dear, people will think you are mental’. At the same time, she seems never to have recovered from a sibling’s death and to have constantly seen misfortune as the vengeance upon her of a remorselessly paternal God for sins she had somehow committed but which she could not comprehend.

It is a portrait of harrowing pathos. She does much that any psychology, modern or hearty, would say was bound to spell ruin, but we feel, running through this narrative, the weight of anxiety that any ‘special’ child might bring.

It is a strange book, this memoir, luminous but grieving. It is as though it has taken Manning Clark a lifetime to come to terms with a via dolorosa that was always there and which cannot be separated from the primal images of the faces of love.

There is much else besides in this very moving testament. There is an impassioned defence of the sinners and the life affirmers – the ordinary people who liked a drink or a girl, the publicans with whom the man from Nazareth chose to take his meat. There is also the characteristic Manning Clark effect whereby the ordinary tragedy or glory (of the Reverend Clark and his wife and all these extras) is hung with the symbols of high romance – as if the mighty opposites were implicit in any human breast.

Here are graphic images of fear – the enemas of childhood and the degradation rituals of school – and this book is almost as Freudian, at the line of artistic implication, as it is old-fashioned in its emphasis on spiritual recollection and generalised recall. There is a brilliant and loving portrait of Lofty Franklin, the headmaster of Grammar in Clark’s time – the steady, melancholic man who held up before his eye, in the face of communal death, the stark dichotomies of the Christian and Greek views of life: redemption and annihilation, take your pick. He was the man who told him he would be a historian and that the dark and squalid canvas of Dostoyevsky would mean much to him.

If it is a symbol of the Cross he carries through the last part of the journey, it is only a symbol because this is the work of a man of constant sorrows – a Rachel who will not be comforted.

He was born in a young country to two people who shared the decadence of a religious faith like a battleground or schizophrenia. He has not only seen that division writ large on the face of the nation, he has tried to articulate (without simplification) the predicament of wanting to believe in the goodness of whatever spirit moves the sun and other stars while never being quite sure that the spirit is real or that its name is love.