Mary Morrissy: Mother of Pearl [1996] paperback
MOTHER OF PEARL, the first novel by an acclaimed Irish short-story writer, explores the disturbing territory of the divided self. Through the story of the kidnapping of a baby, the notion of personal history as received fiction is examined. The novel asks: what makes a family? Is it mere kinship through blood, or something more profound and intricate? What keeps it together? What tears it apart? The action of the novel is seen through the eyes of the baby's mother, the kidnapper and the child herself. By using a split narrative, Mary Morrissy draws the reader into the necessary deceptions perpetrated in the name of maternal love, developing many of the themes explored in her first book - guilt, superstition, revenge, and the rage of the excluded whose flawed vision of the world produces a dangerous yet compelling logic. In MOTHER OF PEARL, the characters, dismayed by the random hand of fate and coincidence, desperately seek to make sense of the world, and in so doing set up a chain of events that inexorably leads to tragedy. Dramatic, blackly funny and tragically topical, MOTHER OF PEARL is a remarkable achievement.
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MOTHER OF PEARL, the first novel by an acclaimed Irish short-story writer, explores the disturbing territory of the divided self. Through the story of the kidnapping of a baby, the notion of personal history as received fiction is examined. The novel asks: what makes a family? Is it mere kinship through blood, or something more profound and intricate? What keeps it together? What tears it apart? The action of the novel is seen through the eyes of the baby's mother, the kidnapper and the child herself. By using a split narrative, Mary Morrissy draws the reader into the necessary deceptions perpetrated in the name of maternal love, developing many of the themes explored in her first book - guilt, superstition, revenge, and the rage of the excluded whose flawed vision of the world produces a dangerous yet compelling logic. In MOTHER OF PEARL, the characters, dismayed by the random hand of fate and coincidence, desperately seek to make sense of the world, and in so doing set up a chain of events that inexorably leads to tragedy. Dramatic, blackly funny and tragically topical, MOTHER OF PEARL is a remarkable achievement.
