Pearl

‘Okay, well this is embarrassing. I first invented the characters as a teenager, then I became obsessed with the Medieval poem ‘Pearl’ and with trying to write about the death by drowning of a good friend. I wrote the entire book in long-hand first. Or the first version. I have written more versions – all totally different with different narrators and with timelines varying from 24 hours to 32 years – than I am going to admit. All I can say is, I don’t exactly recommend this method of lifelong obsession, but this was the project that would not leave me alone. I felt it was mine, somehow, that it belonged where I belonged, and that my relationship with it defined me as a person.   

‘For as long as I have tried to write this book it has been a response to the poem, “Pearl”, so much that I cannot remember how the two first became entangled. I love the poem. It might be the most perfectly complex and yet emotionally direct and simple poem every written. I realised that my story and the story of ‘Pearl’ both had a parent and child separated by a river of death and trying to communicate with each other, and that although the poem promises consolation in the form of religious teaching, the narrator does not feel consoled, in fact he remains despairing. What fascinated me about the poem was this interplay between raw emotion and the cage of intricate stanzas in which it is expressed.   

‘I suppose in retrospect I could say that writing the book kept me sane, but at the time it didn’t feel that way. Perhaps even the opposite. I suspect that if a writer understood how their writing was processing parts of their own lives, they would lose interest in it pretty quickly. It only makes sense in that way later. Much later.’   

Read the full interview here.

‘Pearl, an exceptional debut novel, is both a mystery story and a meditation on grief, abandonment and consolation, evoking the profundities of the haunting medieval poem. The degree of difficulty in writing a book of this sort – at once quiet and hugely ambitious – is very high. It’s a book that will be passed from hand to hand for a long time to come.’

Barney Norris, The Guardian

‘Marianne’s narratorial voice also feels occasionally undercooked. There are sections that read more like notes from the novelist than thoughts from a protagonist. As an attempt to portray harmful memory and the damage done by experiencing loss at a formative age, Pearl is highly successful – but emotion recollected in tranquility can start to feel slight if nothing is at stake in the present.’

Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp, Sydney Morning Herald

‘Longlisted for the Booker, this delicate meditation on grief takes inspiration from the late medieval poem Pearl, composed by the unidentified author of Gawain and the Green Knight. If grief is portrayed as always unfinished, the consequence is drawn with melancholy intensity, and Hughes is acute on the dreamlike quality of dissociated states and legacy of traumatic memory.’

Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph

‘Marianne’s voice is so convincing that you come to feel that you’re not just reading a story but bearing witness to real suffering – and redemption.’

The Big Issue

‘More than a mystery, it explores the depths of abandonment, grief and fragility with haunting beauty.’