MEMOIR: Blake Morrison has stopped up the crevices in his parents' narrative with some richly pleasurable prose in Things My Mother Never Told Me. But this may be one of those rare books that fills a much-needed gap, writes Terry Eagleton
Agnes O'Shea, Blake Morrison's mother, came from a well-heeled mercantile family in Killorglin, the child of a genteel mother who kept a maid slaving around the clock and had no idea how to boil an egg. Agnes was one of 20 children, a fact which even the readers of the Irish Times will find remarkable. Faithful to the doctrine that life is sacred, her parents produced a son who died the day he was born, a daughter who did the same, and four children who died in their infancy. Another son was stillborn, an event which was cryptically recorded as "caused through assault by pension officer". Thirteen other children survived, which is how Blake Morrison came to write this absorbing memoir.
All this was one of the things Morrison's mother never told him. Having qualified as a doctor in Dublin in 1942 and emigrated to the north of England, she was reluctant to disclose her tribal origins. She even ceased to be Agnes ("lamb" was too resonant of the Kerry wool merchant family she had thrust firmly behind her), calling herself Kim instead. Having married Arthur Morrison, a fellow GP, she ceased to be O'Shea as well. Arthur Morrison called her Mummy, and called his mistress Auntie. His other sweetheart he called Terry, a gender-bending name which he also bestowed on his labrador. It was one of those standard, suburban, screwed-up families.
Despite this, the Morrisons' existence seems to have been fairly unremarkable. This, indeed, is one of the several ironies of this memoir, which painstakingly reconstructs from some old correspondence a relationship between Kim and Arthur which matters to Blake Morrison only because they were his parents. Embedded in this particular irony is another - the fact that Morrison is fascinated by his parents as pre-parental figures, intrigued by the life they led before he appeared on the scene as their son. It is a pair of passionate young lovers he is eavesdropping on here, not the reputable middle-aged physicians he remembers in real life.
All successful novelistic characters appear blithely autonomous of their authors, except perhaps for the ill-starred protagonists of Muriel Spark's The Comforters, who keep overhearing the novelist writing about them. Fictional characters need to break the Oedipal bond and struggle free of their progenitors. Here, in a curious reversal of that conflict, Morrison liberates his mother and father from their parental personas, releasing them back into the pre-history of his own existence.
Or does he? Seeing your parents as though you were not there is a gracious imaginative act, but it may also be a subtle way of disowning them. It recalls the Freudian fantasy in which we deny our parents in the delusion that we were self-born. Or, perhaps, the delusion that we were never born at all - in which case we cannot die either.
Through the devotional act of writing, Morrison grants Kim and Arthur a fullness of being that is the opposite of how a child usually views its parents. The selflessness of art compensates for the infantile egoism of life. Yet this lovingly meticulous restoration involves a good deal of speculative embroidery and probably a fair bit of fantasy. How selfless can a fantasist be? As often, the creative imagination also involves a primordial transgression - in this case, Morrison's scanning of thousands of intimate letters which were never intended for his eyes. This, he concedes, was "transgressive" and "sacrilegious", "a shit's trick". But no self-respecting writer ever allowed a little matter like morality to come between between him and his imaginative prey. Is Morrison honouring his parents or plundering them?
The ironies proliferate. Things My Mother Never Told Me is an act of homage which is also a ritual of compulsive possession. This, too, is a familiar ambiguity of the imagination. It is Agnes's silence about her past which drives her son to a kind of epistemophilic fury and sends him off rummaging among the Kerry graveyards. Agnes O'Shea was self- effacing, low-profiled, enigmatic. She had reinvented herself in the time-honoured passage from Ireland to England, and Morrison feels somehow obscurely cheated of her true identity. His book is Oedipus's attempt to decipher the riddle of the Sphinx - to invent a previous existence for this precious, frustratingly elusive woman.
But why couldn't he just have left her alone? Is he doing this for her or for himself? When Agnes responds to his childhood queries about her Irish past by prosaically insisting that there is nothing to tell, why can't he take her word for it? It is as though he is the fey English tourist allured by the mystery of Killorglin, and she the hard-headed native who knows that there is no such conundrum.
Like Nature, the imagination can't stand a vacuum. If it senses a nameless gap, it must plug it. Morrison has stopped up the crevices in his parents' narrative with some richly pleasurable prose. But this may be one of those rare books that fills a much-needed gap.
Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory at the University of Manchester. His latest book is Sweet Violence (Basil Blackwell), a study of tragedy
Things My Mother Never Told Me. By Blake Morrison. Chatto & Windus, 338pp. £16.99