Pearl (2023)

Why this one?

This is another one on the 2023 Booker Longlist, from which I’m cherrypicking a few books that grab my attention. This one was a fairly random choice, to be honest. I needed to read some contenders by female authors (and people not called Paul in general), it’s another very nice cover, and it comes with a recommendation on the cover from the loveliest tutor I had at uni. So that’ll do.

Siân Hughes is a Welsh writer who grew up in a small village in Cheshire, northern England, where Pearl is set. She has mainly published poetry, sporadically since the 1990s. Her first collection, The Missing (2009) won the Seamus Heaney award for first collection, as well as being shortlisted for numerous other awards. Alongside her writing, she works in a bookshop, teaches creative writing in charitable settings, and is currrently undertaking a PhD. Pearl is her first novel, and has been in gestation for 'most of [her] adult life'.

Thoughts, etc.
Pearl tells the story of Marianne, a young mother who is reflecting on the loss of her own mother, who disappeared (presumed dead) when she was eight years old. Left with her father Edward and baby brother Joe, she has spent her life struggling to understand her mother’s motives, grieving both for her mother and for the family home which they had to abandon in the wake of her loss. It is a novel which draws inspiration from the medieval poem ‘Pearl’, one of a few extant poems written by the presumed author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a contemporary of Chaucer. It also draws from Hughes’ own grief for her mother, which led her to move back to her childhood home, and the suicide of a friend.

To my mind, the novel’s blurb slightly overplays the significance of the medieval poem as a basis for the novel. While it’s clearly an inspiration in terms of themes (grief, family, nature), imagery and suchlike, enjoyment of Pearl doesn’t really rely on any knowledge of its namesake. There’s a sense of its protagonist as being out of time and connected (via her mother and her childhood home) to the natural and spiritual world in a way that eludes many of her contemporaries and leaves her feeling dislocated, which I guess is in some ways calling back to the poem as source material, but it’s certainly not a connection that dominates the book.

Hughes has said that she has spent much of her adult life writing this novel, and it certainly carries the feeling of something being worked through, laboured towards. Marianne is narrating the story from the present day, examining incidents from throughout her life looking for clues to the reasons for her mother’s disappearance, and we go on that journey with her. What begins as a story of Marianne’s grief and sense of perplexed abandonment by her own mother acquires new layers as the story unfolds, and we learn that beneath that grief lies another, more deeply buried grief that, once understood by Marianne and the reader, gives a whole new perspective on her mother’s actions.

The book is heavily indebted to poetry, from its stated main source to the patchwork of poems and songs that introduce each section and again hark back to an older world and a sense of ‘oral tradition’ of words passed on from mother to child. It takes from poetry a precise kind of language, not ‘poetic’ in the flowery, overblown sense but rather in the sense of the right words placed in the right order, with the superfluous discarded. I really enjoyed it stylistically, particularly having anticipated something much more elaborate and complex.

Its central character is absorbing, shown experiencing a range of memorable would-be life-changing incidents that never quite turn out the way you (or she) expect, as she seems unable to move forward due to her remaining perpetually haunted by the moment of her mother’s loss and obsessed with ‘figuring it out’. Her teenage relationship with an older girl, her own post-partum psychosis after the birth of her daughter, and an encounter with a modern-day pagan/hippie collective all stick in the mind as vivid highlights.

The ending of the novel strikes a somewhat optimistic note, for me, as Marianne, using both discovered facts and lessons from her own lived experience, manages to piece together a likely reason for her mother’s disappearance - no less tragic, but less of an inexplicable abandonment than she begins the novel believing it to be.

Score

8.5

Another really strong contender here, a really beautiful little book that has a lot to say in its short length, and leaves you with much to ponder. I’d say it’s much more of a universal read than its blurb’s obsession with its medieval source material would suggest. It’s perhaps less showy and thematically ‘of the moment’ than some of the other books I’ve read on this year’s list, which may hinder its chances, but it’s yet another book that I’d really love to see on the shortlist.

Next up

One or two more from the list I think before the shortlist announcement, with If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery up next.