Booker Prize long-listed Pearl by Siân Hughes is the latest addition to the growing pile of books in recent years that have delved into complicated mother-daughter relationships. It narrates the tale of Marianne grappling with the memories of her mother, who had left her and her family with a young brother and father when she was eight years old.
All Marianne is left with are the familiar smells of her mother’s herbs and vignettes of memories that seem to collide and collapse into each other, revealing little about their veracity. Capturing the poignancy, Hughes writes, “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. The pot of tea in the middle of the table, safely away from her children... The half-knitted striped jumper for when Joe went up a size. The seed catalogues tucked into the corner of the kitchen window.”
As Marianne remembers the games she played and the songs she sang with her mother, she realises how they appear to have different meanings when revisited with adult eyes. The new perspective reveals the image of her mother as a woman struggling with her mental health, trying to shield herself from the outside world. Now a parent herself, Marianne becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to her.
“When someone takes their life, they don’t only steal the future out from under our feet, they also desecrate their past. It makes it hard to hold on to the good things about them. And no one deserves to be judged on the worst five minutes of their life, even if those five minutes turn out to be their last.” Marianne is convinced that there is more to her mother’s disappearance beyond the last footprint that was discovered by the riverside when she vanished.
Wanting to unearth the mystery, she grows obsessed with a medieval poem, Pearl. In it, the protagonist, referred to as ‘I’, experiences profound sorrow over the loss of a white pearl, potentially representing a daughter or spouse. The narrative unfolds through a dream in which the character visualises a river and considers the far bank as a paradisiacal place. In this dream, the character encounters a girl dressed in a garment adorned with white pearls and, mistaking her for the lost pearl, sets out to cross the river. Drawing parallels, Hughes’s story gradually unveils the mystery of the mother’s quest for a particular ‘pearl’ and the reasons behind her vanishing act.
Pearl is a compact, emotionally charged literary journey. The book explores the intricate nuances of the sense of loss, and how it transforms over a lifetime, and orbits themes of grief, motherhood and self-discovery. The story is slow in its pick-up, but its high engagement quotient makes it difficult to discern the exact moment when one gets tightly reeled in and becomes invested in Marianne’s grief. The first-person narrative of the poem only accentuates her pain and confusion tenfold in the minds of the readers. We bear witness to the changes in her as she goes about her search for an answer. Though not all answers may be found, it is the journey that becomes a healing pilgrimage.
Pearl is Hughes’s debut novel. She is a poet first. That is why perhaps she begins each chapter with lines from rhymes inspired by local folklore and customs, which she skilfully integrates into the text. The story’s lyrical prose and vivid imagery make it a deeply moving literary composition that is likely to resonate with all who have experienced loss. Sample this: “So instead I talked about the creaks in the stairwell and the cries of the vixen in the garden that could pierce the soul.” When poets turn novelists, there is a degree of uncertainty surrounding the outcome. For Hughes, however, this transition is a triumph.