Book: Pearl
Author: Siân Hughes
Publication: Picador
Price: Rs 499
Death leaves behind as much as it takes away. The grief that follows is first felt in the absence of a person and, then, in the presence of everything the person leaves behind. Pearl translates this grief into a story of an absent mother and a daughter and, through her, a husband and an infant — left behind. At eight, Marianne Brown loses her mother on a rainy day with nothing but a mud-patch footprint for a note. The mother who smelled of mint, who believed in angels and saw them, who sang sad old poems in a sweet voice without letting her sadness slip out of her throat, is gone. Auditing the possible reasons for her sudden disappearance, some assume suicide; some, an unfortunate accident; and others, a planned escape to an old affair. All three possibilities have roots in the past, but it is not the mother’s story. It is, however, the story of who (and what) she leaves behind.
Out of all of Marianne’s (and, by extension, Hughes’) attempts to record her motherless journey, this version sees the light of day: Margaret, the mother, walks out of the house and never returns. The now diabetic husband/father, Edward, raises a daughter
who is keen on remaining stray and an infant, Joe, who is free to shape his life without being haunted or shadowed by his mother’s ghost. They move out of the old house — a “hopeless maze of guilt-ridden corners” — and into a new house that “smelled wrong”. Instead of fearing abandonment, Marianne grows up accepting it to be true and deserved. She retaliates by missing school and forgets to read, eat, sleep and be well and has to relearn all those things. A chain of poor decisions and several self-inflicted cuts on her body later, Marianne finds art but not faith in her talent. As time passes, emotions taint memories and the need to honour her mother’s life fills her; perhaps to keep her alive. She collects stories for Margaret and her empty grave.
Wisdom and empathy come with age as Marianne becomes a mother and understands the strain of raising a child and keeping oneself afloat in the process. The granddaughter, Susannah Pearl, who is born years away from the time or place of her lost grandmother, is still privy to the “family history of grief”, which is passed on through the milk, like immunity. For Marianne, however, parenthood becomes a lesson in forgiveness.
The novel ends where it begins — at the Wake — but in between this continuum, time as a key character becomes utterly human, shedding its structure. Instead of solely moving forward, it takes three steps back and one step forward. From motherhood, Marianne travels back to her childhood and back further to her mother’s past, only to return to her teens and, eventually, to the present. As accurate is this depiction of how memory works — in all directions at once — the content and symbols of the story lose their voice at times in its uneven narration.
Pearl seems to be a watered-down reflection of a 14th-century poem by the same name, where a man who has lost his precious pearl, possibly a daughter, mourns his loss awake and in dreams. Hughes’ novel — where a daughter takes it upon herself to grieve for her father and for herself — echoes the medieval English poem’s anonymity as well as its gaping familiarity with loss. The symbolism, however, does not end here. The characters of the Pearl Poet and Hughes’ book seek consolation and are even offered some, but they never feel truly consoled.
An award-winning poet, Siân Hughes’ writing has always been ridden with themes of grief, finding one’s lost identity, and postpartum stress, as can be seen in her short stories in Pain Sluts (2021) and the poems in Sunshine & Nothing Else (2020) and The Missing (2009). Hughes’ journey of writing the novel and its characters progressed organically over the years. Although not recommending it, she calls it a “lifelong obsession”. Having grown up in a village (Tilston in Cheshire, England) like Marianne and cycling by an old house like hers, Hughes’ inspiration has come from her own life (events): the loss of her mother, her obsession with the poem, “Pearl”, a friend’s death by drowning, and her own experience of motherhood.
