In Pious Memory by Margery Sharp (Novella a Day in May #6)

When Madame Bibi and I realised we both had In Pious Memory (1967) by Margery Sharp on our shelves, we decided to put it down for the same day of Novella a Day in May – the only forward-planning I’ve done. I haven’t read Madame Bibi’s review yet, but you can do so (and I will do so as soon as I’ve finished writing this).

I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Sharp, and find her such an interestingly diverse writer. Going into this novella, I didn’t know whether she’d be in serious or comic mode. It’s a book about death, but definitely leans more towards the latter. With some surreality thrown in, for good measure.

In Pious Memory comes later in Sharp’s long writing career, and I wasn’t sure whether she’d still have the lightness of touch which makes her dry, sparkling sense of humour work so well. I needn’t have worried. There was something so piercingly wonderful about the opening lines that I knew I was back in safe company with Sharp:

After some thirty years of marriage, Mrs Prelude’s sole manifestation of independence was always, when travelling by plane, to sit in the tail. She and her husband flew a good deal; he was an authority on international banking, much in demand wherever his European colleagues gathered in conference, and though austerely avoiding all attendant junketings – receptions, or visits to historic monuments – invariably took Mrs Prelude along to look after him at the hotel. He suffered from asthma. His giant intellect was housed in but an average body – indeed rather below average; average only in the sense of being unremarkable: all the more startling therefore was the effect when on rostrum or at banquet board he suddenly rose to his feet and let his intellect loose like a line from a mouse-trap. Mrs Prelude naturally never witnessed this transformation herself, she was always at home in the hotel bedroom sterilising his inhaling-apparatus with water boiled over a portable methylated-spirit stove; but other wives told her about it.

Mrs Prelude feels safer sat in the tail of a plane, and chooses it even when her husband can’t get a seat next to her. We are just preparing to smile at her silly foibles when, on the second page, we learn that her precautions are justified. Mr and Mrs Prelude are in a plane crash: ‘Mrs Prelude, in the tail, was but shocked and bruised, whereas of her husband there remained but the remains.’

The Preludes had two adult children (Elizabeth and William) and a daughter on the cusp of adulthood (Lydia). None of them were particularly close to their father, who had more time for economic academics than for his flesh and blood – but they speedily begin recreating him in false memories, giving him attributes that they wish he’d had, and recalling things that it would have been convenient for him to say.

But then… Mrs Prelude announces that she thinks her husband might still be alive.

Quite a lot of the rest of In Pious Memory focuses on the impetuous Lydia and her cousin Toby going to France, to see if they can find their missing father/uncle. We dart back to England often, to see how unaffected William and Elizabeth are – and how Mrs Prelude is choosing the next stage of her life. This isn’t a novel about grief, but about how a big change in a family will set off other changes – and how much will remain the same.

Unlike other Sharp novels I’ve read, this one doesn’t feel meticulously planned. Particularly in the French sections, the plot spirals off into such unexpected and disconnected directions that it felt a bit like Sharp was making it up as she went along. But that made it feel irrepressible rather than incoherent. It was odd but great fun – or perhaps I should say odd and great fun.

I really enjoyed In Pious Memory, and I think Sharp was wise to make this one a short book (my edition coming in at 160 pages). A longer novel with this plot might have required the reader to feel stronger emotions than amusement, and occasionally exasperation. As it is, Sharp guides the reader through the strange experience and we come out the other side having had a delightful, unusual time.