The Novel Pearl is a Gem

 

 

 

 

Pearl (2024)

By Siân Phillips

Alfred A. Knopf, 210 pages.

★★★★

 

Pearl is one of those small gems that falls into your lap and when you finish, you’re glad that it did. It was long-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize that ultimately went to Hernan Diaz’s Trust. It’s hard to argue against that choice, but to quote from the book’s back cover, Pearl is “an exceptional debut novel… a mystery story and a meditation on grief, abandonment, and consolation.”

 

Marianne Brown is eight-years-old and her brother Joe is still in nappies. Their father Edward teaches at a local college in Cheshire, but we infer that he’s an underpaid adjunct. The family lives in a ramshackle home and mom is a 1970’s free spirit who tends a large garden, decorates with flowers and herbs, and fills Marianne’s head with folk tales, poems, rhymes, songs, and a few mainstream stories such as Charlotte’s Web. Then the unthinkable happens. Marianne is in the garden, but when she looks up, her mother is gone. Did she wander off to a visit someone? That’s the presumption, but she doesn’t come back. Searches turn up nothing other than faint footprints by the swift-flowing tidal river. Did she slip and fall in? What is the meaning of an unmarked gravestone near the river’s mouth?

 

Marianne does not adjust well. She becomes a perpetual school truant and once she learns how to game the system, stops going altogether. She carries with her the verses, folk wisdom, and stories that her mother taught her but at several junctures she forgets how to read and has to learn anew. Thus, she knows a lot about some things but very little about the things society values. She fervently believes, however that the key to the mystery of her mother’s disappearance resides in a poem titled “Pearl.” Like Marianne and her mother, it’s an enigma. “Pearl” is an important work from 14^th century England, but it’s long (1,212 lines of alliterative verse), difficult, and scholars to this day are not certain who wrote it or exactly what it means. For many years it was said to be about a father who has lost his daughter, but best guess now is that it’s an allegory on death and heaven written as a dream vision. Some have speculated that the same hand also wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

 

That tells us a lot about Marianne. By the time she’s a teen she’s socially gauche, fearful, and resistant to change. When Edward relocates his family to a house in the village, it is henceforth the New House that fails to measure up to the Old House, where Marianne takes refuge from time to time, though the place is falling into ruin. Then again, so is the New House–note the personification via capitalization–because a generalized stasis besets all three of the Browns. Marianne always calls her father “Edward,” and why not? It’s not as if he’s any better at playing the adult role than either of his children.

 

Imagine the burden that Marianne carries–Joe was an infant when his mother left–even though she acts as if she’s fine. We see through her eyes and feel her hopes, frustrations–an unreliable girlfriend when she’s 15– and her anxieties as she tries to carve out a life that makes sense to her as she drifts into adulthood as a single mother and art therapist. Even the Old House is rebuilt with new unorthodox (but monied) owners.

 

I don’t mean to suggest that Marianne is a sad sack for life. Perplexed, yes. Yearning to solve the mystery of her mother’s disappearance? Yes, again. It would be more accurate though, to say that hers is decades of coping in which sadness, pluck, curiosity, and intermingle. Over time, some memories dim and others become bathed in brighter hues. One commentator aptly called Marianne’s a “splintered reality.” I tend to call Pearl a ghost story without spectral visitors.

 

As a final observation, note that each chapter is introduced with a rhyme or verse that packs metaphorical meaning. Each, including embedded song lyrics, are part of the English folk tradition. You can enrich your reading experience by searching for the source material. Here are two song links, one for “Raggle Taggle Gypsies”* and the other for “Tam Lin.”  I can’t resist the second as it involves two of my favorite musicians ever, lead vocalist Sandy Denny (R.I.P) and guitarist Richard Thompson. 

 

Rob Weir

* Irish legend Christy Moore sings "Raggle Taggle Gypsies." I chose this one be/c it has close caption so you can se the lyrics. The cc isn't great but it will give you an idea. If you'd like Tam Lin lyrics, click the link.

 

 

North Woods an Unsual Novel

 

 

 

North Woods (2023)

By Daniel Mason

Random House, 384 pages.

★★★★

 

North Woods is easily the most unusual novel I read in 2024. You could call it one homestead, one orchard, and three centuries. You could just as easily call it humans, the natural world, and the supernatural. Or perhaps ecstasy, murder, madness, and decomposition. Any tags you use will say much but not very much about this imaginative work form Daniel Mason.

 

However you approach it, don’t give up. I nearly did as it didn’t seem to hold together. Characters are dead and reappear, time passes, yet seems elastic. How does a 20^th century schizophrenic connect to a Colonial farmer or a 19^th century luminist painter? Did I mention the steamy passages on beetle sex? But suddenly I got it and realized I was reading something extraordinary.

 

It helps to break free of linear history. Insofar as calendar time matters the novel begins in the 1760s when a pair of Puritan lovers, one of whom is a minister, flee from the social strictures of Massachusetts Bay colony and take refuge in the Berkshires woodlands. A veritable microcosm of American history unfolds on the same acres. To the degree that there is a central character, it would be Charles Osgood, a British officer in the French and Indian War who leaves the army and also finds sanctuary in the area, buys the land from a local minister, has several black workers, and raises twin daughters Alice and Mary who are so close they finish one another’s thoughts. Charles is obsessed with fruit, acts the part of a Berkshires Johnny Appleseed, and raises a very special apple that grew from a seed once swallowed by a dead British soldier. The fate of Alice and Mary is unexpected and unsettling.

 

You name historical character types and they appear in North Woods: Native Americans, slaves and slave catchers, a crime writer, spirit mediums, numerous farmers, librarians, ministers, shopkeepers, pen-pals, professors, a Gilded Age  snob, members of a historical society, police, housekeepers, a woman who hears ghosts…. Again, how does all of this meld? Mason has written an epistolary novel, that is, one in which left behind letters, documents, journals, and notes contribute to the novel’s structure. Some of these connect characters in real time; others fold the past and various presents into one. This to say that traces are left from the past. Most New Englanders could read and write–but in this novel we have to be careful with time, as it seems to be leaky. 

 

If you lose your way, I suggest you think of how things connect to three anchors: Osgood, Robert, and Nora. The Osgood sections can seem like a Farmer’s Almanac at times, but fecundity and decay is one of the book’s themes. Robert is diagnosed as schizophrenic (and might be), but as he wanders through the woods with the intent of “stitching” (healing the world) by numbering each tree and stone he encounters, he hears voices. Does he? If time is leaky, is Robert crazy? North Woods opens with a couple and comes to a stunning end with another, Mark and Nora. Nora, a university student, is as obsessed with nature as Osgood was with apples and, as a modern-day person, has a lot of science to back up her fascination with plants and soil. She’s also under psychological care, though, so perhaps she too is mad as a March hare.

 

I’m sure many of you are far better versed in biology than I, but it is my contention that Mason wants us to contemplate the relationship between decomposition and the law of conservation of mass, but he doesn’t want us to stop there. The unstated question is what about transcendence? What indeed? Does anything ever “disappear?”

 

Some critics have argued that Mason has so many irons and questions in the fire that there are rather dramatic tonal shifts and foci. I’d call that fair criticism, but I go back to an earlier remark. Stick with this novel; when you get it, you can’t shake it. I’ll leave it to you to determine if North Woods is brilliant or pseudo-intellectual if, of no other reason, I’m not sure!

 

Rob Weir