Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

This book was obviously from one of the featured piles in my local Waterstones store and the bookseller who served me told me that ‘everyone is talking about it.’ I listened but won’t be doing the same.

Martha, the main character, Martha – behaves unusually, even erratically, which quickly or ultimately affects everyone around her. Her sister Ingrid sort of sticks with her in a sisterly holding operation and her husband Patrick is tolerant for far longer than perhaps I or many of us real people would have been.

It transpires that Martha is suffering from a mental illness, though the author refuses to tell us what it actually is. She tells us only that it is ‘- - ‘ which I thought was a teaser for us to guess and then be surprised or have our suspicions confirmed at the end of the book. This didn’t happen.

I found it simultaneously lazy and arrogant for the author not to research such a condition which no doubt many other people might suffer from. Either she couldn’t be bothered to do the research or didn’t want to be caught out by ‘incorrect’ symptom being displayed (not that I’m sure that’s possible, given the vagaries of mental illness strands). Instead she seems to have settled for an ‘all-encompassing but unnamed’ condition, presumably in an effort to mine the rich current seam of literature surrounding mental illness and anxiety. No doubt that is also the reason why the book (and bookseller) have donated so many gushing soundbites to this book.

We are sort of allowed into a fractured mind, but no more so than watching a bad episode of ‘Casualty’ on a Saturday evening.

I did find it witty in parts and quite touching, especially the difficult Christmas tableaux through the ages. I thought that Patrick was either so blindly in love with Martha that looking after her surpassed all the abuse she gave him, or simply that a deeper personality profile hadn’t actually been coloured in.
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The ending of the book was a disappointment to me (and not because it was the end) and overall I thought both the book and the reviews merited far more than this flimsy piece of neither journalism nor captivating novel.

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