Lead Review
- Book: Sorrow and Bliss
- Location: London, Oxford
- Author: Meg Mason
This novel kept coming up in my social media timelines, so it was perhaps time to pick it up!
At the heart of the story is Martha, who, in her teens is already showing signs of high anxiety and difficulty integrating into a social life. She spends a lot of time holed up in her father’s study, where she feels safe. Despite her inauspicious entry into adult life, she does get married to a long standing family friend, Patrick, whom she has got to know at her aunt’s house in Belgravia, over several family Christmas get togethers.
In the present Martha is grappling with hitting her fortieth birthday and we know that Patrick is still around. The nature of their relationship is a bit of a puzzle. He is a medic (and in fact delivered her sister’s baby on the bathroom floor) and a long suffering soul. He is one of nature’s carers and he clearly sticks with his wife through thick and thin, tolerating her increasingly irascible and bad behaviour – and by doing so enables her to continue on her dysfunctional trajectory. Until her behaviour becomes so grotesque that he can no longer stay with her.
She comes from a bohemian family, father is a poet, her mother a sculptor, but neither really has success in their professional life. Her mother is subjected to a lot of Martha’s angry fall out and blame; Ingrid, her sister, also comes into the line of fire and Martha’s fundamental decision about not having children is projected on to her. Martha is very good at scatter-gun blame.
I really enjoyed the first 2/3rds of the book, the writing is terrific, the observations sometimes so spot on that it made me smile and chuckle. It is an incredibly creatively written book (there are no numbered chapters). Then it moves into significantly darker territory, roughly when Martha gets a diagnosis – unspecified and made up, according to the few words that the author shares at the end of the novel. It is at this point that the author strays into very questionable territory because Martha is portrayed as a self pitying and very unpleasant person, who expects people around her to ‘do their job’ when it comes to her. The question is obliquely posed whether bad behaviour can somehow be excused when there are mental health issues present, and given Martha is diagnosed with a condition (that apparently tends to afflict high functioning people), she seems to be given licence to stomp her way through people’s lives, regardless of feelings. The overlay of contextualised mental health issues can make this a problematic read.
The ending, ahem, feels just a little lazy, I would suggest.
Having said that, I enjoyed reading it and loved the writing style. Setting is not strong but you do get a light sense of London and Oxford by inference.
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