The unidentified 14th-century “Pearl poet” left behind a single manuscript written in Cheshire dialect, containing Pearl, Gawain and the Green Knight and two other religious poems. The manuscript is among the most treasured salvagings of Middle English literature, a crucial part of our rich inheritance as readers of English poetry. While most readers are more likely to know Gawain, Pearl is an extraordinary work about love, grief and faith, strikingly filled with suicidal ideation.
In her Booker-longlisted debut novel, award-winning poet Siân Hughes claims Pearl as a touchstone and source. A young mother, Marianne, recounts the death of her own mother and the years of grief that followed. As an exegesis of Pearl it’s slippery, recasting all the relationship dynamics to explore a different grief. The poem tells the story of a father’s grief for a lost daughter, so Hughes’s Pearl feels like a rather brilliant refraction, because while her story focuses on a bereaved child, there is still a grieving father, Edward, now in the supporting cast, a Rashomon retelling that works to expand the landscape of loss the Pearl poet explored. And this is not the end of Hughes’s delicate redesign – as her tale unravels, it becomes clear that the lost “pearl” is another person entirely, and the grief we are concerned with in the bulk of this narrative is a kind of secondary product of an earlier loss, a tale told at one remove. Which, Pearl leads one to think, might be a way to imagine all griefs – the result of earlier losses stretching back and back to the beginning of the world.
Hughes’s novel, which is wonderful on the detail of a late 20th-century rural English childhood and at its best recalls Edna O’Brien’s masterful A Pagan Place, is radical in largely dispensing with dramatic tension in order to create a circling story that maps the lasting impact of a loss. Marianne is a woman whose body has kept ageing, but whose heart and mind are trapped in the moment she lost her mother. The way trauma cuts one off from the world and isolates the sufferer in the moment that hurt them is brilliantly rendered here.
Like many pearls, though, the novel has imperfections. The decision to situate the narrator who is telling the story some decades after its key events happened, without introducing any real accompanying narrative in the present day, robs the book of momentum. The remembered events themselves are made less dramatic because we look back to them rather than live through them – everything in this novel is already over and finished and done – so the book’s attempt to portray grief becomes a portrait of stasis.
Marianne’s narratorial voice also feels occasionally undercooked. There are sections that read more like notes from the novelist than thoughts from a protagonist. As an attempt to portray harmful memory and the damage done by experiencing loss at a formative age, Pearl is highly successful – but emotion recollected in tranquility can start to feel slight if nothing is at stake in the present.
• Pearl by Siân Hughes is published by Indigo Press (£11.99) in the UK and UQP in Australia on 12 September ($27.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
