I had long been a fan of Melvyn Bragg’s South Bank Show on television, but although he is a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, I had read little by him before picking up this novel on its publication. I have read more of his novels since, but Grace and Mary is has made by far and away the greatest impact on me.
The chapters alternate between the present, when the narrator visits the nursing home where his mother is lost to dementia, and the past, which reconstructs hers and her own mother’s lives.
Grace is a gifted child who has a chance, through education, to escape the poverty of her background. Then an unjust incident, in which she comes to the rescue of her vulnerable sister, destroys that slim opportunity. Grace overcomes that setback and is doing well until a greater tragedy (her beloved sister’s accidental death) shatters the moorings of her world and sets her on a heartbreaking path that involves single motherhood, abandonment by the father of her child and giving up her baby. Mary is that baby, and both hers and Grace’s stories are narrated by Mary’s son John.
This is memoir in the guise of fiction; Bragg unveils his mother’s (Mary’s) and grandmother’s (Grace’s) lives in a way that will live long in the memory. The small Cumbrian town of the writer’s youth is vividly evoked, as are the beauty of the scenery and the rich and varied history of that northwestern English county. But what stands out most of all is the loving and respectful way the two brave women at the heart of the story are brought to life.
Why didn’t Bragg write a straight-forward memoir as the story is so closely autobiographical? It could well be partly because he probably didn’t know many of the details of his grandmother’s life (as John explains in the novel, he had to make up much of Grace’s story). But it may also be that novels can tell greater and more profoundtruths than factual memoirs can.
