Mind Picker: Pearl

She had circled the word Pearl and drawn an arrow into the margin where she wrote in capitals: CONSOLATIO. I didn’t know why she had missed off the last letter. But consolation was what I was looking for. I was ransacking her books for it. I was secretly collecting clothes from the drawers under her bed and keeping them under my pillow one at a time, trying to preserve the smell of cinnamon-soaked beads she kept in there with them. I was rubbing leaves from the garden into my palm, looking for the perfect spell of mint and pea-shoot and fresh onion, and when I pulled nettles instead, dragging the stinging side all the way up the stem between my fingers, I wrapped my hand in dock leaves and believed the stinging was a part of the magic. If I suffered enough I could make her reappear. Pearl was too hard for me to read.

Listening to Pearl on audiobook (because it was the only format in which I could get an early ARC), I agree with other reviewers who note that narrator Laura Brydon (who gives a marvellous performance) speaks with a smile in her voice, giving this melancholic meditation on memory and grief a wry, gallows humour vibe. I didn’t dislike the dissonance between voice and subject matter — and the playfulness in Brydon's voice as she recited rhymes and children’s songs did seem appropriate — but something in the voice did prevent me from emotionally connecting with the main character’s trauma; I was more amused (and there are several deliberately funny bits) than moved (despite the tragic bits), and something in that makes me want to round down to three rather than up to four stars. Still: a very interesting experience, and especially interesting for the further reading this prompted about author Siân Hughes (here’s a great, if spoilery, interview with the author) and what I learned about the medieavel poem “Pearl” that inspired this novel (and here’s an extract from Hughes’ favourite translation into modern English). Like with previous Booker Prize nominees (such as Reservoir 13, Lanny, or Treacle Walker), the Booker jury seems to have a soft spot for books that engage deeply with the British countryside and its folklore, and Hughes finds this soft spot with a draughty country home and its green garden and muddy riverbanks — all haunted by the absence of a mother who left one day and never came back. I’m certain this would be a different (better) reading experience with the written word, and while I did like this very much overall, I will round down to three stars. (Note: I listened to an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted [which I sourced from Google Books to get the punctuation right] may not be in their final forms.)

When I had Susannah, I looked over my shoulder for her, I looked up from my daughter’s new face and realised I was looking for my mother’s eyes to meet mine, to agree with me she was the fairest young maiden that ever was seen. I waited for her to join in the singing. I started looking around for her, and crying. The midwife asked if there was family history of post-partum psychosis. I said, no. Only grief. There’s a family history of grief. You can pass it on. Like immunity, in the milk. Like a song.

When Marianne was eight, her mother disappeared: leaving behind a husband, daughter, and infant son; never to return. As the police investigate the disappearance, Marianne will learn some of her mother’s secrets, and as the years go on, she’ll learn others as well. Even so: the absent mother will forever be a mystery and the greatest influence on Marianne’s life, and when the family is forced to relocate to the city to be closer to the father’s work (and child care), the loss of the family home and its property will create the second absence around which Marianne creates herself. Pearl, the novel, is told from Marianne’s POV, and as she recounts her sad childhood and troubled adolescence, it is immediately made clear that neither she nor the reader can quite trust her memories, but as she recalls a loving mother who sang her lullabies, read her children’s books, and told her the legends of the Green Children and the Little People, the mother seems but one more legend tied to the vacant rural landscape. Marianne becomes obsessed with working out the mystery of her mother’s absence by studying her annotated copy of the poem “Pearl” (about a father grieving his young daughter’s death) and she becomes a multimedia visual artist, illustrating scenes from the mediaeval epic. And when she gets older and becomes a mother herself, the post-partum psychosis Marianne suffers (as, apparently, Hughes did herself) gives her some possible insight into her mother’s unknowable mind; and makes her worry what damage she might be passing down to her own daughter.

As for format: Each chapter begins with a children’s rhyme (generally a dark one along the lines of, “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off your head”), and as Hughes explains in that interview cited above, they’re meant to act as “clips” to hold each chapter (or “pearl”) together; and when she repeats an early song in the last, climactic, chapter, it’s meant to link back to the beginning in a “rosary-like sequence”. There is something very interesting in this format — and in the variety of songs and stories and rhymes that link Marianne to her mother and to the landscape — and the rambling old house and the possibility of ghosts gives everything a Gothic tension. And again: I suspect this would have worked better for me had I read the written words.

Forgetting is not the worst thing. Remembering is not the worst thing either. The worst thing is when you have forgotten, and then you remember. It catches you out. You forgot for a moment, a day, a week, a month, but the effect is the same each time you remember. You feel it rushing back around your lymphatic system, and you remember the hurt. And there is a part of you that thinks, perhaps the pain is optional now? What might it be like to live without it? This is treachery. You hate yourself for it.

Marianne’s unreliable memory was an intriguing storytelling device, and the fact that the absence of her mother felt like a physical reality around which Marianne was moulding herself was very well done: this is a well-crafted, allusive work of literature — there’s so much in here with reference to the inspirational poem and the rhymes/legends and the idea of how the landscape and the “Mother” shapes you; and what happens when they are taken away — and while, more than anything, this felt like a meditation on grief (as is the poem “Pearl”), it’s the grief that didn’t touch me (in the audiobook format anyway), and I’m left impressed but cold. But as a debut author from an independent press, I’m happy that the Booker nomination is getting attention for Pearl and Hughes (and I wouldn’t be unhappy if this made the shortlist).