Book Review: Sorrow and Bliss
19/08/2021
Book Review | Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss is not a book that has arrived quietly. Although Mason herself says she wrote it pretty much in secret, it has been received with enthusiasm from reviewers and fellow authors to the extent that, despite a self-imposed book buying ban and a general dislike for heavier, more expensive hardbacks, I was desperate to read it. Just as I thought I couldn’t wait a second longer, I discovered my delicious mother furtively trying to hurry a purchase through at the Waterstones till while I was browsing the buy-one-get-one-half-price table. Due to the hype, I felt certain that once I started reading it (i.e. immediately) I’d adore it. So, when at first it felt slightly different to what I expected, I admit to a brief worry before realising that I was in fact falling in love with it nonetheless.
Sorrow and Bliss is a book that resists a neat and tidy description. It’s told in the first person by Martha, a woman with a (for most of the book) undiagnosed mental health disorder and is broadly a story of her messy life, structured around the breakdown of her second marriage. We jump back and forth between the present day, her courtship with her husband Patrick and her childhood with her beloved sister, chaotic parents and holier than thou rich Aunt Winsome. Speech marks are used sometimes, but often halfway through a sentence the format of speech will alter. Long sections of prose are interspersed with brief recollections of an exchange of texted emojis with her sister. It’s impossible to know what’s coming and it’s astonishingly like real life.
Though I loved the compellingly unique way in which it’s written, it’s the novels’ characters and their relationships to each other that will stick with me the longest. Martha herself is such an incredibly realistically drawn character that the same voice could have been narrating a memoir and it would have rung true to me. That, by the way, is not me suggesting that Sorrow and Bliss is autobiographical or that Martha is Mason in disguise. It’s worth noting that because, although novels often have an autobiographical bent, it is regularly assumed that women are thinly disguising their own life story whenever they write anything vaguely interesting or insightful. Although the book is ostensibly about Martha’s relationship with Patrick, it is the relationship between Martha and her sister Ingrid that’s the lynchpin of the novel for me. As someone with a sister myself I recognised so much about the intimacy and love between them as well as the limits of their relationship, and I adored everything about how they supported and protected each other throughout the book, regardless of their own circumstances. The rest of the characters are equally multi-faceted. Someone who might seem completely lacking in positive attributes comes up trumps while a potentially exciting lover turns out instead to be riddled with issues. Mason has a talent for unravelling each personality for us over the course of the book, keeping us guessing as to who might disappoint and who might surprise.
The reason I was so intrigued by the book when I first heard about it is its handling of mental health, specifically as experienced by a woman. Psychological illness is much more widely discussed nowadays but I’ve still rarely come across a novel that centres it the way Mason has. Martha’s experience, both in terms of how she copes personally and also in how she’s treated by those around her is well explored, with multiple diagnoses from different doctors, ever-changing cocktails of pills and much of the patronising and dismissiveness women who seek help for these issues will recognise. Martha’s behaviour is erratic and even while you might love her, you can also empathise with how difficult her behaviour can be for those around her. At times you think you might have given up on her entirely. I appreciated the experience of being inside Martha’s brain and understanding how separate she sometimes feels from everyone living their lives around her, how everything inexplicably can seem out of reach at times. It’s a dull but honest truth that mental illness, so often represented sensationally in literature and pop culture, is in reality sometimes much more of a slow burn, with opportunities and life in general just slowly slipping away. Mason never clarifies what Martha’s mental health condition is, even when a new and improved doctor finally correctly diagnoses her, and this is very effective. It forced me to stop comparing Martha to symptoms I’d googled or people I knew and instead to just accept what Martha chose to share and how it impacted her life.
As I mentioned earlier, the relationship between Martha and her husband Patrick is a huge part of the novel, covering the whole period from their first meeting as teenagers to the present day. When I tried to explain Sorrow and Bliss to my own husband, I realised that I was fascinated by what the union meant to each of them. Although his childhood is deeply lacking, Patrick grows up to be a pretty good guy. He’s a doctor, proactive, kind and steady. Martha on the other hand never seems to live up to her potential, suffers paralysing bouts of depression and behaves erratically at home. Yet Patrick’s devotion for her seems steady and the notion is raised by Martha’s mother that she is lucky to have this relationship. I’ve long been fascinated by this view that people with physical or mental disabilities should be grateful for being loved, that they’re bringing less to the relationship than the other person. When we finally hear from Patrick about what Martha means to him it’s clear that it’s not a trade off for him, that it’s her he wants, regardless of the fact that loving her isn’t perhaps always simple. I think that for people who read this novel who themselves feel they might be unworthy of love or that they might be ‘too much work’, there’s something beautiful in this representation.
On almost every review of Sorrow and Bliss that I came across before I read it, the word ‘funny’ or ‘hilarious’ is included. A few months ago, in my own writing group, someone read a wickedly funny chapter from their own novel that had most of us chuckling and a few looking on in despair, declaring the piece depressing. I think perhaps this is a similar scenario and utterly dependent on how the reader, as an individual, uses dark humour in their own life. Because really, although there were funny characters and dryly amusing moments, for me Sorrow and Bliss was deeply sad, reflecting so much of the darker and more disappointing aspects of life and the human condition. That said, I loved it and thought that there was hope embedded into the story as well as an abundance of familial love and support. So, a cautiously uplifting book but not, for me, hilarious.
I have waited a full week since finishing the book before reviewing it and I still find myself floundering. When I began reading, it didn’t seem like a particularly complicated novel. The prose is very easy to read with plentiful dialogue and tongue-in-cheek asides peppered throughout, and the story is compelling. On finishing, and attempting to write about it, it strikes me how multi-layered the novel really is and how effectively it has broken new ground in exploring family and love and adult expectations and mental illness all at once. This will be one I re-read numerous times.
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