Martha Friel is the pretty daughter of a poet and a sculptor, a funny food column writer, adored by her husband Patrick since she was a teenager. She is also terribly, terribly sad. In Sorrow and Bliss, Meg Mason’s funny, tender, sorrowful second novel, she tries to navigate life after the “little bomb” which explodes in her head when she is 17, expelling everything else. College, then work, then friends, then lovers are crushed into small, dark spaces by the all-consuming weight of spiralling darkness and isolation. But somehow, amid all this, what emerges is a story of love, in all its many forms.
As its title suggests, Sorrow and Bliss is a continual layering of despair upon joy; you’ll find it in the deep blue and sunny yellow of its front cover, in Martha’s dispassionate and moving narration, in the repeated prefacing of every happy moment with glimpses into a gloomier future. Even before we travel back through Martha’s life, we learn at the very beginning of the novel that her marriage to Patrick has ended. So, even when we later move through the delicious anticipation of their early will-they-won’t-they moments and the sweetness of Patrick’s quiet devotion, we know that this rose-tinted optimism will always end in separation.
Mason’s narrative drags the reader downwards, but it also creates moments of light, sitting within the darkness without diminishing it. When plunged once again into another period of all-encompassing despair, Martha writes:
“I got a letter from the library, forwarded by our tenants. It asked me for the Ian McEwan back and £92.20 in compound fines. Because there was no money […] at the time I rang up and told them that unfortunately Martha Friel was a registered missing person, but if she was ever found, I would ask her about the book.”
This elicits a smile, but a sad smile, because even though she is joking, in these moments Martha really does seem to be disappeared from her own life, snatched away from her chance at being happy. She tells us: “Unless I inform you otherwise, at intervals throughout my twenties and most of my thirties, I was depressed, mildly, moderately, severely, for a week, two weeks, half a year, all of one.” Time is gulped up by her illness, great swathes of life lost to a sadness that many of the people around her cannot understand. But even when they cannot really help her, Martha’s relationship with her loved ones is endlessly moving and lifelike. From her heartbreakingly gentle father to her slightly smug but ever steady sister Ingrid, Martha’s family lends new layers of poignancy to her struggle.
This poignancy is given human weight by Mason’s strikingly vivid prose, which with its understated references to Desert Island Discs, the Daily Mail celebrity sidebar and Bake Off’s infamous Baked Alaska episode, weaves a narrative made tangible by the common details shaping the periphery of all of our lives. When Patrick shaves his beard off in increments, moving from “Charles Darwin to suspected attacker to Mr Bennet BBC adaptation,” our collective reserves of cultural markers locate the image firmly within the reality of our modern lives.
And even as she laces each line with fine detail, Mason also creates great depth of feeling in all that she does not say. Martha never names her condition; she refers to it instead as “– –“, and so keeps it as her own separate reality, preventing language from creating a makeshift bridge in meaning, reaching blindly into what it believes to be her perspective. In this way, she stops the world from crowding into her experience with its myriad preconceptions. After all, throughout her life Martha has already been assigned enough false labels, with successive doctors deciding she is suffering from glandular fever and then depression, thrusting her into social and medicinal frameworks which erase what she really feels.
The people around Martha have lazily thrown out words whose meaning maps an only inexact version of her reality, making seemingly small but actually vital errors about her diagnosis, telling her repeatedly “not to get pregnant.” And this careless use of language is sadder still than the darkness in Martha’s head, as it steals from her the one wish she harbours deep within her heart. A wish which she is gradually taught to reject, to regard with fear.
Sorrow and Bliss is, ostensibly, the simple story of one woman’s lonely battle with her mental health. But Mason’s narrative is so considered and intricate that it builds within it rich commentaries on the relationships between people and things, language and feeling. It is at once a monologue and a family saga, a social commentary and a romance, a tale of motherhood and a study on grief, its voices echoing across the people and places of our real world.
Words by Emma Morgan
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