The poet and writer Blake Morrison has long made a habit of getting to know his closest relatives better only after they have died. I don’t mean this unkindly; in life, I’m sure he’s as dutiful and devoted (or not) as the next person. But there’s no ignoring the fact that the grave seems to release him, spurring his deepest thinking, his best prose and (perhaps) his most assiduous, open-hearted loving. In 1993, he published And When Did You Last See Your Father?, in which he exhumed his dad. In 2002, he gave us Things My Mother Never Told Me, about the several lives of his late mother. And now here he is with a third volume. “If you’re reading this, my sister is dead,” he writes on page seven, for the avoidance of doubt.
A better title for this book, in which Morrison turns his attention to his younger sister, Gill, and his half-sister, Josie, might have been The Fallout. At the heart of Two Sisters, after all, lies the story that furnished his first memoir: his father, Arthur, having an affair with a married neighbour called Beaty (Josie was their daughter; born in 1959, she was Blake’s junior by nine years). Once again, we’re reminded that the insistent question “But didn’t you know?” is singularly futile when it comes to relationships, particularly those that are clandestine – the trouble being that the head, the heart and the gut may all say different things at once. You know and yet you don’t know. In his childhood, as he explained first in And When Did You Last See Your Father?, Beaty and Josie were forever in plain sight, cherished friends who regularly joined the Morrisons at their holiday chalet in Abersoch; the likeness between Arthur and Josie was obvious. Yet the words “daughter” and “sister” went unspoken. Only when Arthur, Beaty and Kim (Morrison’s mother) were dead were DNA tests done, the results surprising no one.
What were the consequences of this open secret? The adults ran things on the principle of least said, soonest mended. Beaty and Kim, loving the same man, first reached an accommodation and then became friends, a bond that existed beyond the aegis of Arthur’s monstrous male entitlement. But this isn’t to say the situation wasn’t corrosive, too. In Two Sisters, Morrison wonders what a person is allowed to blame on their parents in adulthood (they fuck you up, your mum and dad). How to explain the fact that while one sibling can escape childhood unscathed, another may be fatally wounded by it? Why did Gill, an alcoholic of 30 years’ standing, drink herself to death? And why did Josie, not long after having discovered the truth of her paternity, take her own life? Unbearable as such questions are, he must attempt to answer them.
Morrison punctuates his narrative with a whole library of literary quotations as well as accounts of the sibling relationships of (among others) Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Mary and Charles Lamb and Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. But he seems to know he’s interrupting himself – why else tell the reader his footnotes and potted biographies may be skipped? – and I think he might have saved most of this for his commonplace book. He doesn’t need ballast. In her brother’s hands, we’re more interested in Gill than in Maggie and Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, or in the attitude of JR Ackerley to his suicidal sister Nancy (Ackerley is more deserving of a spot than most, his father having kept a secret family, though Morrison doesn’t explore this). Shaped by his words, Gill’s drunken inversion of ordinary domestic life – bottles hidden in the garden, credit cards secreted for the taxi drivers who’ll deliver her wine – has a novelistic tinge, at once comic and tragic.
Though Morrison has a fondness for certain kinds of disclosure – in this book, his testicles make more than one not entirely warranted appearance – on the page, he’s an unshowy, unsentimental Yorkshireman, a phlegmatic voice perfectly suited to the description of quotidian horrors. The Morrisons are thoroughly middle class – both his parents are doctors – and the family lives in Thornton-in-Craven, a village between the Yorkshire Dales and the Forest of Bowland; nothing to hurt the eyes there. But things are not as they seem. The reader comes to see Arthur’s blithe optimism – the way he folds people into his plans like so many deck chairs – as a tyranny. The dogged cheeriness veneers emotional violence. In her 20s, Gill is accused of stealing, an early sign of her unhappiness. Arthur’s response is to lock her in the cellar, and though she can’t forget this, she never leaves the village either. Like many who live in an authoritarian state, she prefers the dictator she knows.
Why does Gill drink? And why does Josie take an overdose of the insulin she’s prescribed as a diabetic? If there can be said to be reasons for such things – Morrison is rightly chary of simple cause and effect – we might say that Gill’s alcoholism is encouraged by the isolation that comes of her growing blindness (she has two degenerative eye conditions) and that Josie takes her life in despair at the knowledge her husband is having an affair. But there’s something else at play here and it surely has to do with the full beam of the attention of their father, so longed for, whether consciously or unconsciously, and yet never fully felt. The arrival of Josie, Arthur’s easy-to-love second daughter, displaced the first (Gill) in his eyes and yet this cuckoo, however adored, was never acknowledged as his child. Both women went out into the world with a lethal chink in their human armour. Meanwhile, their brother, by dint of being a son, and a clever one to boot, strolled around with his chain mail more or less intact.
I would have liked Morrison to say more about class, deracination and the limits of education, all of which play a part in this story (or so it seems to me). There’s something fascinating and unexplored here: Beaty and Arthur’s infidelity, and Kim’s agonised acceptance of it, having nothing whatsoever to do with the 60s, a decade that’s happening elsewhere. Did feminism touch Gill and Josie’s lives even the tiniest bit? But as an investigation of a brother’s pain and as a memorial, Two Sisters is a wonderfully heartfelt and tender thing: delicate and unstinting and clear-eyed. Something has been worked out – a knot eased just a little – and I hope there’s comfort in that for him.
Two Sisters by Blake Morrison is published by Borough Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
