Dealing with personal loss and grief as it does, Siân Hughes's Pearl fits comfortably into what seems to have been a common theme of the books longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize.
Marianne was only eight years old when her mother walked out of the house one day and disappeared forever, and she will spend the rest of her life trying to reconcile her memories of that tragic day. At the time of her mother's disappearance, Marianne was thought to be too young to handle the details of what may have actually happened. Now she needs to construct a coherent story, one that she can believe, something that makes absolute sense to her. Marianne's near-impossible task is complicated by the fact that her memories are largely comprised of half-remembered snippets of adult conversation heard through a child's ears.
Marianne freely follows her thoughts and memories one after the other wherever they may lead her, and it is through her stream-of-consciousness narration that the reader sorts through her perception of that dreadful day right along with Marianne. Chronological order is not important because Marianne realizes that she can only guess at the correct sequence of her earliest memories. She herself understands that she is an unreliable narrator of her own past, and soon enough the reader comes to the same conclusion.
Pearl is a novel about losing the most important person in one's life. It's about personal guilt - both earned and self-inflicted - especially the guilt a person feels about finally just moving on with the rest of their life:
"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..."
Siân Hughes's debut novel is one of which she should be very proud.
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| Siân Hughes author photograph |
Sounds like this novel packs quite the punch. And I think it's one I would like. Marianne's personal journey sounds both poignant and powerful.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite thing about it is that Marianne is the most honest unreliable narrator I've ever read. She's trying to figure out whether her memories are real right along with the reader.
DeleteThank you for the review. Sounds very stirring
ReplyDeleteMystica, it's very emotional and honest about childhood memories vs. reality of the past. It's a very good novel.
DeleteI struggle a bit with stream of consciousness but this sounds like it might be worth the effort. Especially as it's quite close to home - my father left home when I was five and like the narrator in this book I was too young to be told why or given any details. I will look this up.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know that about your personal history, Cath. This one will likely strike very close to the bone for you. The stream of consciousness narration is pretty easy to follow because it does follow chronological order once a new memory is being probed. But the reader, as well as the narrator, can never be exactly certain that the events triggering the memory actually happened in the order Marianne believes they happened. And that changes the meaning of the events entirely if she gets it wrong.
DeleteI like the plot of Pearl because its straightforward, a mother walks out on her family and we watch the effect it has on her daughter Pearl into adulthood. There is alot a writer can do with this because it touches on core issues about life. Too many new novels it seems to me get bogged down in fantasy, plot twists and everything else. This book sounds like it keeps the story simple but memorable.
ReplyDeleteKathy, I think it's pretty much a straightforward novel, but with the one big caveat that even the narrator wonders if what she remembers so vividly really happened. The older she gets, the more she wonders. I did like the theory she eventually settled on to explain her mother's disappearance.
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