Martha is 40 and finally married to Patrick, a man who’s been secretly in love with her ever since teenagerhood. She now loves him back, but seems unable to be happy or even, on occasion, very nice to him. Ever since a “little bomb” exploded in her brain at the age of 17, she’s been on and off antidepressants, generally to little avail. Ultimately, when gentle, patient Patrick can take it no longer and walks out, Martha returns to her parents’ bohemian (AKA dysfunctional) family home in London’s Goldhawk Road and is forced to examine herself more closely. Is it simply, as she’s always felt, that she finds it “harder to be alive than most people”? Or is there some more devastating explanation – or diagnosis – which has been evading her all this time?
This is a novel about mental illness but, thanks to Mason’s astute, even inspired handling of the subject (of which more to follow) it succeeds in covering a great deal more ground besides. First, it’s a sharply entertaining – if not especially original – comedy of the maladjusted English middle class. Martha’s bittersweet relationship with her alternately protective and exasperated sister is fondly reminiscent of Fleabag. And there’s something recognisably, nostalgically old fashioned about this London of organic supermarkets, Belgravia Christmases, Southwark penthouses and privileged girls who work at small publishing houses specialising in “war histories written by the man who owned it” and are sent home at lunchtime because there isn’t enough to do.
Perhaps most compellingly, though, as Mason’s narration flits back and forth in time over 20-odd years, this is a grippingly conveyed love story. The will-they-won’t-they? of Martha and Patrick finally daring to recognise their love for each other, and the how and why of their relationship’s ultimate collapse (no spoiler, this is signposted from the start), forms the wholly convincing mainstay of the book. Patrick, a lonely and neglected child who grows up to be a consultant in emergency medicine, is that rare thing in fiction: a good man who manages to be vividly complex, adorable and still realistic.
And Martha knows it: when he declares that he wants her to be with him all the time, she feels as if her body is “suddenly full of warm water”. Why, then, can’t she understand that Patrick accepts her for who she is? “Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine,” he tells her. “That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change.” Still, it is Martha’s voice itself – her woeful deadpan narration always teetering between the comic, the tragic and the downright unlikable – that makes this novel sing.
Which brings me to the illness itself. Daringly, Mason makes a choice not to name it, using instead a series of dashes whenever it comes up. This might at first seem odd in a book that is otherwise almost aggressively littered with proper nouns (from Amis, M, to Moss, K, and from Starbucks to Pret via Waitrose and World of Interiors), but it only makes the whole conundrum more intriguing. Certainly, it means there’s no danger of this ever becoming an “issues” novel.
Because this lacuna also creates, almost literally, a pause, a breathing space. It invites us to stay our various preconceptions and instead concentrate only on Martha’s actual lived experience of her illness, the often confusing and upsetting life inside her head, something that Mason’s by turns humorous and appalling, uplifting and devastating and sometimes mischievously awkward prose landscape perfectly reflects.
Of course, it also makes powerful use of a tool with which any serious writer is all too familiar: the more unspecific you can dare to be, the more space there is left for the reader to get in there and fill the gaps. So Martha’s sad and ultimately self-sabotaging mental illness may have a name and eventually, you hope, some treatment, but, still, it’s very hard indeed not to see yourself in there.
Most of all, perhaps, this is a novel about the effect we all have on each other, unstable or not, diagnosed or not, especially where love is concerned. And never is this more heartbreakingly evoked than in the moment when Martha, realising that there are “crimes” in marriage that are so great you “cannot apologise for them”, sits on the sofa eating the dinner her husband has lovingly and patiently cooked and turns to him and simply says: “Patrick? I like this sauce.”
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£14.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
