Lorna Sage 'Bad Blood'

Memoirs get a bit of a bad rap in the literary world, but Lorna Sage's story about growing up in fifties' Britain is as skillfully written as anything out there, literary or otherwise, and in certain ways more compelling on account of its status as 'fact'. It is not restricted to personal revelation - it is in some ways quite closed on the subject of the subject - but it opens a window on British essence that is as thoroughly illuminating a treatment as you will ever read. Well-adjusted Britons like to minimize the evidence of their emotional lives - objectivity and irony are national virtues - but they run the risk of seeming remote, imperious, even cruel, because the national virtues are very fine instruments indeed and not everybody knows how to wield them. Lorna Sage is one of the people who knows how, and her witty, dry, absolutely unsentimental account of growing up in a vicarage on the Welsh border with her childish and fragile mother and her spectacularly duelling grandparents, a dirty, defiant child riddled with headlice and in love with books, pregnant at 16 and on the front page of The Daily Mail on her graduation day (as half of the first couple in England to graduate the same class at Durham with Firsts) is the sort of book that makes you understand at last why the British persist in thinking of themselves as great. Her crisp, elegant, perfectly-pitched sentences seem to issue from the fount of a formidable intelligence which has encountered much and assimilated all with infinite composure. She is sensitive to the colloquial nuances of the language, and so the tone of the piece is as modest as it is refined. It is utterly devoid of self-pity, droll, incisive, serene, and curiously representative, insofar as it encompasses both working and educated classes. There isn't even a hint of self regard in the tale, and yet it seems the testament of some sort of aristocrat, a woman who is gifted enough to be able to parse her own narrative and analyze its characters with a pure, almost zen-like detachment. Sometimes the judgements she delivers seem to levitate in an atmosphere devoid of emotional baggage altogether, and yet the story is not without its struggles, its bitter disappointments and sharp angles, its spells of loneliness and boredom and dissatisfaction - the point is, none of these experiences have reduced the impeccable spirit which breathes throughout and the pristine wit which is its messenger by so much as a hair.
None of which says enough about how funny the book is, how delightful, how precise the aim of its tiny darts of irony and pleasure, how fascinating its portrayal of family dynamics, of marriages both bitter and explosive (her grandparents) or selfish and exclusive (her parents) or of the delicately mordant quality generally of its observations on human frailty. Sage was a professor of literature at the University of East Anglia until she died just days after the book won the Whitbread Biography Award in 2001, so perhaps it is her lifetime of teaching and crafting analyses of others' great works that lends her own story its air of modest greatness ... whatever it is, the book deserves its accolades, including those that mark it out as the very best example of what memoir is capable of.