Pearl by Siân Hughes is enchanting, in the literal sense. It was longlisted for the Booker in 2023, which was incredibly well-deserved. I read it after my friend Robina lent it to me in April of that year. Haunting, eerie, unforgettable, and wide-searching — it leaves a lasting stain on your memory and your mind.
I’ll wash you in new milk
and wrap you in silk,
and write down your name
with gold pen and ink.
Marianne’s mother has already gone by the time the story begins — her absence is the prelude to the story, as well as its crux. Marianne’s life constructs itself around this missing centre: she is always tilted and leaning, one of her central pillars having given way beneath her. Hughes never tries to explain — throughout the text, she exemplifies the “show and don’t tell” maxim with rare discipline.
There she is again, somewhere out in the margins, a shadowy emptiness, guilt, a door closing just out of sight, the breath of it, something like the smell of the garden, an empty, straw-like taste. Nothingness.
The novel dips in and out of folklore, rural myth, paganism, poetry, and fairytale; it resists exact comparison, apart from these (maybe Max Porter?). I suppose it is a bit like a poem by Mary Oliver, because of the natural setting and the sensitive treatment of mental illness. Or a poem by William Blake, or Lorca, for the same reasons. The novel is deeply rooted in details of place, and the locations, particularly Marianne’s childhood home, are very vivid. It is inspired by the Cheshire village where Siân Hughes grew up; the world is damp and green countryside, threaded through with fairytale and magic.
Each chapter begins with a snippet of a lullaby, a nursery rhyme, or a song. This lends the text a singsong familiarity and lightness, and also helps to root it in the rural and pagan tradition. It definitely creates an eerie darkness, as fairytales so often do, which builds and intensifies as the story develops. The book takes its name from the 14th-century Middle English poem, ‘Pearl’, whose poetic narrative, we later find out, is linked intricately with the way the story ends. It’s a bit like a detective story; but it’s not linear, it is meandering and recursive. Marianne is not making her case to any outsiders (not even to the police, whose investigation feels intrusive and damaging), but simply trying to make sense of it all within herself. She wants to know why her mother left, and the truth about where she went.
I measured the stanzas through my fingers like a rosary, recited their odd sounds in my head, painted endless unfinished series of images of the garden and the bed of herbs, the riverbank of shining mud, the pebbles in the stream bed lit like jewels, the banks crowded with young children in their purgatory white gowns. I followed the dreamer out of the garden down the bottom gate along the river, and woke back in the garden to start my journey over again. And I never felt consoled.
When Marianne later becomes a mother herself, the question reiterates itself. Having experienced entire constellations of mental health problems throughout her childhood and adolescence, she comes to feel most connected to her mother when she experiences these anew during motherhood. Most acutely, when she undergoes a frightening bout of postpartum psychosis — a profoundly destabilising experience, but one she suspects they shared. It is a kind of terrifying but knowing communion.
Marianne’s sense of self and her conception of reality are fragile, and tested throughout, but the love and loyalty she feels towards her mother is unwavering, and all along, she really just wants to understand. By the end of the book, she does: in a way that is unexpected, heartening, and cathartic. What stands out to me is the extraordinary grace and compassion she is able to extend towards her mother — and, eventually, towards herself. Hughes is unflinching in her confrontation of mental illness, even (or especially) in its most raw and unpalatable forms. These are demonstrated, rather than dramatised. Hughes places trust in her reader: there are no clarifying statements or explanations about the medieval allusions, or when Marianne slips out of time and place. The tone is always matter-of-fact (Marianne recalls of her ex-partner: unfortunately when he came to visit his week-old daughter I was insane.) The boundaries between worlds are porous and confusing, and Marianne is a consistently unreliable narrator.
Built into everyone’s brain is the point at which the information from the senses becomes totally unreliable. What we see and hear and taste bears no relation to what is actually there. So the brain goes into overdrive, making up more and more ludicrous explanations for the slightly strange information coming in on all sides.
One of my favourite features of Hughes’ writing is her synaesthesia; the way all of the senses meld together and alchemise. Sense of smell is very important throughout the novel (it is said to be the sense most closely tied to memory). Marianne’s childhood is scented by soap, baking, mildew; her adolescence by menthol cigarettes and ethanol; her memory of her mother smells of the old kitchen, the damp stone and sandy garden, the sharp orange tang of coal tar soap, an aftertaste of vanilla, the smell of her own clean skin. […] of peppermint and apple peeling and soap, the way [the pillow] always did when she climbed out of my bed at the end of storytime. The girl she goes out with as a teenager memorably smells (and tastes) of twiglets. When Marianne has a baby, and goes through a kind of mental breakdown, her sense of smell becomes heightened and distorted. The sensory unravelling underscores her psychic disintegration, and auditory and visual hallucinations.
I could smell the colour, its blood and cat fur and old coats in damp carpets. I was afraid he would look down and see all our colour pooling into the carpet, that he would smell its bad smell and know there were cats in the house, with their germs and half-dead mice and baby-smothering pelts.
Sound, smell, sight, taste, and touch melt into each other throughout the novel, in times of sickness and health, in a fascinating way: the hot breath of the barbecue outside the window hanging in the air like an aftertaste of her soft oval-shaped vowel sounds and sing-song foreign voice. Voices, sounds, and scents are critical to Marianne’s understanding of those around her.
There is great subtlety in the “showing, not telling” of Marianne’s mental health troubles, especially those she experiences as a teenager. We are swept along by the narrative and so preoccupied by the absence of Marianne’s mother that we do not notice that Marianne isn’t eating, isn’t attending school, is wearing long sleeves to cover the scars on her arms, finds herself in a toxic relationship with an exploitative and masochistic older teenage girl. She makes herself invisible in ways that are deliberate and ways that are not. She is ghostly, herself; the retreat is a form of survival.
Hughes uses the clever metaphor of an “exit sign” — and a “trip switch” — to describe Marianne’s suicidal ideation, which she feels has been handed to her by her mother as she passes. It is an escape route that doesn’t go away, but remains lit.
When someone close to us steps into that river and never comes out of it, the rest of us are left with the possibility. It lights up an exit sign in our heads […]. Sometimes it has felt to me as if all the other pathways are more difficult, more twisted and indistinct. Sometimes it has felt as if the only path is the one lit up for me by that sign.
The river where Marianne’s mother disappears underpins everything, and pulls us towards it insistently. It calls to mind William Blake, and Federico Garcia Lorca — poets who present a symbolic truth, which seems to be about one thing, but pulses with the unbearable reality of another. Blake saw angels; Marianne’s mother sees angels on the stairs. Lorca writes incantations and paeans to the gypsy community (los gitanos); Marianne feels welcomed by the traveller families she meets. She slots in better to a society less rigidly rationalised and stratified.
And in Teddy’s one good eye I remained a good, sweet, kind-hearted girl.
Blake
Blake immediately came to my mind when I read Pearl. Particularly The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but also some of the pastoral symbolism of Songs of Innocence and Experience. In the former text, he writes: If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. This feels close in texture to how we see Marianne’s mind: a consciousness undone not by chaos, but by a clarity too bright to withstand. Her world is unstable, populated by visitations, angelic and ghostly presences. Another line from Blake: The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me ... they told me that all true wisdom comes from the senses. In Pearl, Marianne’s senses are not just receptors but the very architecture of her reality. When her senses distort, she occupies a different realm entirely. Blake would have seen this as sacred.
At age eight Blake is said to have seen a “tree full of angels” on Peckham Rye, the brightness of their wings “bespangling every bough like stars”.1 Frederick Tatham described Blake’s visitations and hallucinations benignly as “peopled thoughts”. He was childlike, and yet profoundly philosophical; he believed that Everything that lives is Holy. His work is both fearsome and magisterial, sophisticated and wholly simplistic.
Edward had spent all the years since my mother walked out of the door wishing he had known better and stayed with her after Joe was born until the angels stopped living on the stairs.
Lorca
There is also something very Lorca-esque about Pearl. Its dream logic and unresolved feminine mourning, the duende which vibrates underneath.2 Marianne’s affinity with the gypsy community and folklore. The grief which is shadowy and sensory and half-sung before it is easily narratable.
I could have traced the whole plot of ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsies’ from my bedroom window where I sang the first verse, looking out to hear the gypsies singing at the gate [...] to where I ran through the grass to ride on the getaway pony, a half-fallen down apple tree strung with baler twine for reins, away to the field where I could lie under the stars and listen to their beautiful music.
Lorca’s writing is also synaesthetic and vivid. The colour green is a symbol of lushness, life, nature, decay and death: the line Verde que te quiero Verde, from Romance Sonámbulo (the ballad of the sleepwalker). Duende refuses linearity and resolution and instead insists upon return; so too does Marianne’s grief.
What Hughes returns to time and again is the dreadful sense of our own betrayal — the cold, blunt shock of remembering, once you have forgotten. When even continuing blithely to live on after death feels treacherous.
Forgetting is not the worst thing. Remembering is not the worst thing either. The worst thing is when you have forgotten, and then you remember. It catches you out. […] You feel it rushing back around your lymphatic system, and you remember the hurt. And there is a part of you that thinks, perhaps the pain is optional now? What might it be like to live without it? This is treachery. You hate yourself for it.
[…]
The current that took her under the bridge and out into open water was the flood of memory running like poison through her body, the dreadful cold remembering after you have forgotten.
The loss never goes away, and never will it go away. The book offers an internal shift: not forgetting, or moving on necessarily, but integrating. The grief lives on but it is manageable. I heard a friend describe it as us growing around the grief, which remains the same size, it doesn’t get smaller, but we get bigger. And we wouldn’t want to lose it, the voices of those we love: I was aware as I said it of my mother’s voice inside mine. Marianne can still hear the echoes.
But by the end, there is resolution, and Marianne finds peace and renewed kinship with her mother. The mystery is unlocked in an unexpected way. Pearl is not a retelling of the medieval poem, rather an illustration, with creative license; that is, a colourful extrapolation of some of its enduring images. The pull of the river, the church, the dead woman who is mourned – the permeable boundary between the living and the dead, and the sane and the mad. It feels like an attempt – both of Hughes, the author, and of Marianne, the protagonist – to understand the poem, and on Marianne’s part, this ends up being the key which helps her to understand her mother and the reasons why she left.
Pearl is a thorough excavation of the past — of grief and loss, of identity, mental illness, shared trauma, and of motherhood which spans generations. It is a work of rare depth and clarity. It is astonishingly good.
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, London: Tate Publishing, 2006
Duende is untranslatable but described as ‘spirit of the earth’, a dark, visceral power that exists within some art and gives it its life-force. It is where death and beauty intersect.