The Brooklyn Rail

Siân Hughes’s debut novel Pearl is a gorgeous exploration of the nature of grief and memory and how both can intertwine to create our perspectives and shape our relationships. That Hughes is a poet is clear in her prose, yet her novel is accessible, at times wryly funny, and also deeply moving. When Marianne was eight, her mother disappeared, leaving her behind along with a baby brother (Joe) and a somewhat inept father (Edward). With her mother’s disappearance, Marianne’s childhood shifts suddenly from a rural idyll spent with her mother sharing stories and songs (she’s homeschooled) to a lifelong grief that threatens her survival. Told in chapters that begin with a child’s rhyme or song, the novel shifts through time as Marianne attempts to unravel the mystery of her mother’s disappearance and come to terms with grief. But the novel isn’t only about loss—it’s also about families, love, art, rural England, poetry, and joy. Hughes has said she used as a touchstone for the novel the Middle English poem Pearl, part of a manuscript that includes Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Written in the Cheshire dialect, Pearl is a religious allegory—the pearl being both the dead daughter of a grieving man and the “pearl of great price” (the Kingdom of God in Christianity). But (arguably) it’s not the religious aspects of this poem that have kept it in the English canon, it’s the evocation of lasting grief for a lost child that resonates.

Marianne’s grief for her mother becomes an unresolved trauma that shapes her life. From the start, she doesn’t stand a chance: she’s sent to school mid-term with no uniform, wearing a sweater her mother made. Marianne begins to unravel as she slowly unravels the sweater, swallowing its colorful beads. As she unravels, so too does her family. She’s helpless as their rambling old house with orchards, crumbling barn, and memories of her mother is abandoned for a tacky “New House.” The family’s relative poverty is one of the subtler themes in the novel, showing up in broken pipes, broken windows, and mismatched furniture. Marianne grows into a troubled girl left alone to skip school and self-harm, falling into a relationship with an older girl (Emily) who has her own dark agenda—encouraging Marianne to starve herself. When Emily taunts Marianne into taking her to the Old House, suddenly the power shifts—it’s a rainy, dark rural night and Emily is terrified. She exacts revenge, revealing a tragic secret she’d heard from her mother about Marianne’s family. Although the shock is terrible, ultimately the revelation serves as a breakthrough for Marianne’s understanding of her mother.

Eventually Marianne recovers, becomes an artist/art therapist, and falls in love. She has a child (Susannah) and experiences postpartum psychosis which, although harrowing reading, is another breakthrough. Marianne grieves for her mother but is beginning to understand her and what might have led to her disappearance. A refrain that threads throughout the novel is the folk song “The Raggle Taggle Gypsies” and its theme of a woman who forsakes her husband for the gypsies. Marianne connects this song with her mother’s disappearance but later realizes that the song was her own childhood favorite, not her mother’s. She comes to believe that her mother’s love for their family was fierce and her death a tragedy, not a rejection of that love. “It took me until I was well into my thirties, and a mother myself … to stand up for my right to a positive memory of my mother.”

Words and images hold resonances in the novel that play out throughout: names, songs, water. For example, Margaret is the lost daughter in the poem Pearl; Margaret is Marianne’s mother and the woman (Margaret Kennedy) who runs away with the gypsies in the folk song. The name Margaret derives from the Latin/Greek word for—you guessed it—pearl. And Marianne names her daughter Susannah Pearl. Tracing these connections can lead to distraction, giving us a semblance of the obsessiveness that marks Marianne’s lifelong struggle with her mother’s disappearance and her own mental health. For Marianne, the mystery subsides into a desire to honor her mother’s memory: “I claim all that I can rescue of the time before. Even if someone else tells me the details are wrong, or in the wrong order. Because it is mine.” For those of us who have lost a loved one too soon, sometimes the tragedy, the shock of grief can spoil the memory of any happiness: “Everything about my life until the day she disappeared was evidence of happiness … But in the weeks after she left, we turned all of it into its opposite.” The novel ends with Marianne thinking about the village festival when families honor their dead and the importance of memory: “They never found a note. They didn’t need to. Everything she left us was a note. The songs she left in my head, the fairy tales, skipping rhymes, conversations with the dead.” Ultimately though, through Marianne’s own journey, we’re reminded that while grief stays in our bones, life is not about the past but the here and now, the connections with those we love.