Pearl - Siân Hughes - ★★

AUTHOR: Siân Hughes

GENRE: Literary Fiction

PUBLICATION DATE: July 30, 2024

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A literary fiction novel about a woman who finally learns how to deal with her unresolved grief. Slow and poignant but also rambling (in both its meanings.) Might be a good read for the right reader, but not my cup of tea. (Should have known better, considering it is a Booker-longlisted work.)

Plot Preview:

When Marianne was eight, her mom went missing, leaving behind a distraught husband, a forlorn daughter, and a newborn son. As the years go by, Marianne struggles to make sense of her grief, and tries to understand what might have gone through her mother’s mind in her final moments. When she discovers a medieval poem named ‘Pearl’ and sees its theme being similar to that of her life, she tries to see her life and her pain through the poem’s lens of loss and healing.

The story comes to us in Marianne’s first-person perspective.

I have a fondness for Irish writers. I have a dislike for Booker books (whether winner or longlisted.) I have a soft spot for literary fiction. I shun books that wallow in misery. I love character-oriented books. I avoid novels that are heavily prose-dominated. So this novel could have gone either way. Unfortunately for me (and the book), it went the way it shouldn’t have.

The plot begins with Marianne’s visit to her village for ‘The Wakes’, an annual trip she makes in the hope of seeing her mother again. She then starts reminiscing about her past, going back thirty years to when her mother disappeared and leading us through the interim period: her childhood hurt, her teen struggles, her adult uncertainty.

The book starts off strongly, with a poignant depiction of Marianne’s grief, her confusion about what might have happened, and her struggle to let go of the trauma and to live in the present. Until the narrative was focussed on Marianne’s childhood, I was invested in the story. But once the teen years start, the plot goes the typical way, trudging down the standard pitstops of teen rebellion such as drugs and alcohol and self-harm. I hoped for Marianne to come to her senses soon, but her adulthood seemed to be a series of one bad decision after another. Basically, it was like telling us that once you have trauma in your childhood, there’s no way of living a normal life personally or professionally.

The book depicts 1970s England and its atmosphere in a true-to-life manner. There are some interesting quotes at the start of every chapter, each taken from an Irish fictional work or folklore.

The themes of grief and coming-of-age are seen throughout the book. But these come to us in an endlessly rambling manner. It was like listening to one long self-pitying story. I hoped that the ending would make things better, and it did, to a great extent. The parting chapter was beautiful and bittersweet, with some thought-provoking poetic lines.

Because of the first-person narration, we don’t get to know the other characters as intimately as we know Marianne. I’d especially have loved to know more about her father Edward and her daughter Susanna. It was interesting to see how Marianne always referred to her father as “Edward” but her mom was “my mother.”

The titular ‘Pearl’ has a strong presence through the book. ‘Pearl’, poet unknown, is a 14th-century poem that is considered one of the most important surviving Middle English works and has elements of allegory and dreams. It is present only in a single manuscript at the British Library in London. I read up a summary of the poem in order to better understand its role in this book, and this prep helped somewhat.

I found it interesting to learn that this novel has been forty years in the making. The author used to cycle past a broken-down house in the same village as ‘Pearl’ is set. She then invented characters for the house and began working on this novel. But perhaps the extended writing period created this meandering prose with minimal plot. (Then again, this was longlisted for the Booker, so whom am I kidding! It must hold at least some literary merit for prose lovers!)

I completed this debut work only because I had to complete it. This wasn’t written for us plot-aficionados. The introspective parts where Marianne wonders about the what-ifs and what-might-have-beens are the best. The parts about teen rebellion and going off track in adulthood are boring.

Basically, this is for those lit fic lovers who rejoice in Booker-type books, who value prose over plot, who believe that merit-worthy stories are necessarily dark and gritty stories that delve into human misery. The whole book is essentially segments of musings and introspection, so make sure you are in the right (prose-loving) mood if you intend to pick this up.

My thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for providing the DRC of “Pearl” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.