BIG JACK Sutherland was broad-chested and thunder-thighed, a boozer, womaniser and a serious competitor at amateur sports who once went the distance in an exhibition bout with heavyweight champion "madcap" Max Baer. Then he challenged a real mountain.

The crash was the result of a navigational error during an RAF training flight. His remains were found in the wreckage. It was 1942. He left a wife and a three-year-old boy. This book is the memoir of an Oedipal son's struggle to throw off Big Jack's shadow.

One of the boy's earliest memories is sucking his father's thumb, stained brown from tamping unfiltered cigarettes. "I can still taste the acrid, bitter, nicotine tang," reveals John Andrew Sutherland. Oral fixations continue from self-abasing childhood into adulthood: popping old pre-decimal pennies into his mouth, gobstopper-style, until their copper gleam is restored; eating coldchipsfromdiscardedpaperpokes scavenged from the gutter;BassBitter (thumb-tastingly good!) downed by the "skinfull" during his years of steady slide into alcoholism; LSD in a spiked drink; chilled urine served from the wrong bottle to dinner party guests. Proustian moments?

More are triggered by memories of his mother, diminutive Liz, a peroxide blonde with a Veronica Lake frontal wave, a natural survivor for whose elusive affections the lonely boy finds he must compete with a succession of male suitors, mentors and patrons. "When I was a child, my mother would, when I was lucky, come to my room and peck my cheek by way of a bedtime kiss,"ishismostovertlyMarcel-like disclosure. "I would get a fragrant whiff of gin, perfume and her."

Maternal intimacies are only fleeting, and the boy finds himself regularly dumped with relatives, when Liz takes off for three years with a rich newspaper publisher in Argentina. Wounded neglect explains the five-year-old's hatred for Edinburgh, where he is deposited in the tenement flat at Dalmeny Street, Leith, of stingy Aunt Jean and wicked Uncle Walter. Disapproving ("Scottishly") of his mother's nail varnish and Ronson lighters, they charge her 15 shillings a week to cover the outlay on bread and dripping to feed the boy. He shares a sofa with cousin Mary because the spare room is reserved as a lab for the pink vulcanite and white porcelain of dental technician Uncle Walter's false teeth casts.

The boy's rejection of "the polluted air of Auld Reekie" may also reflect submerged anger with Big Jack, the father whose death is another form of abandonment. He has a horror of picking up the accent of Peebles-raisedJack,andoutlineshisstrenuous efforts to dispose of this affliction (Dettol and a wire brush?) on his return 18 months later to his mother's home town, to continue his rounds of further relatives. "Had I remained another three years in Scotland I would have ended up, like my cousins, in a world of Edinburgh grey until my soul (like my underwear, when I wore it) turned the same colour," he advises. His escape is into the exciting cultural technicolors of Colchester.

The rest of the John Andrew Sutherland story is history, at least among fellow lit crit academics and readers of his literary detection puzzles (Is Heathcliff A Murderer? Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?) which stretched the original idea to three or four volumes. After blowing his A-levels, and a stint of national service, he scraped a place and graduated at Leicester University, to secure his first lecturer's appointment at Edinburgh.

By his own account, he spent the 1960s there in an alcoholic fug, a decade summarised by a vague recollection that he was lucky and happy in the New Town. He went on to hold chairs at University College London and the University of California in Pasadena. He kicked the booze in the early 1980s,therebyadding"sottishness"to "Scottishness" among identities he discarded successfully.

Sutherland acknowledges his book is an addition to the theme of "infantile revenge" which has been a predominant flavour of memoirs in the new century, although in hiscasehedoesn'tanticipatelitigation from aggrieved family members. He suffered a lonely childhood in which books provided emotional nourishment, leading by ample compensation to a well-rewarded and highly protected career. He agrees that he can have no complaints.

Sutherland is a delightful writer when he forgives himself long enough to suspend his fixations with class, accent and betrayal. "Writing like razor blades", he confesses. Remission leads immediately to a cleaner syntax, simplifying itself with fewer subordinateandparentheticalclauses.His chapter on fishing with his grandfather is a beautiful evocation of one of his few bonding experiences as a boy, redolent with the honeyish beeswax coating the angling lines, the comforting aroma of flies kept in a tobaccotinandthetangofafreshly caught pike.

The national service chapters are brilliantly turned. His portraits of teachers and colleagues have a warmth and compassion which he cannot always extend to either himself or those distanced in a childhood unspent.

John Sutherland is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Wednesday, August 15.