Why, then, can’t she understand that Patrick accepts her for who she is? “Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine,” he tells her. Patrick, a lonely and neglected child who grows up to be a consultant in emergency medicine, is that rare thing in fiction: a good man who manages to be vividly complex, adorable and still realistic.Īnd Martha knows it: when he declares that he wants her to be with him all the time, she feels as if her body is “suddenly full of warm water”.
The will-they-won’t-they? of Martha and Patrick finally daring to recognise their love for each other, and the how and why of their relationship’s ultimate collapse (no spoiler, this is signposted from the start), forms the wholly convincing mainstay of the book.
Perhaps most compellingly, though, as Mason’s narration flits back and forth in time over 20-odd years, this is a grippingly conveyed love story. It's Martha’s voice – her narration teetering between the comic, the tragic and the unlikable – that makes this book sing And there’s something recognisably, nostalgically old fashioned about this London of organic supermarkets, Belgravia Christmases, Southwark penthouses and privileged girls who work at small publishing houses specialising in “war histories written by the man who owned it” and are sent home at lunchtime because there isn’t enough to do. Martha’s bittersweet relationship with her alternately protective and exasperated sister is fondly reminiscent of Fleabag. First, it’s a sharply entertaining – if not especially original – comedy of the maladjusted English middle class. This is a novel about mental illness but, thanks to Mason’s astute, even inspired handling of the subject (of which more to follow) it succeeds in covering a great deal more ground besides. Is it simply, as she’s always felt, that she finds it “harder to be alive than most people”? Or is there some more devastating explanation – or diagnosis – which has been evading her all this time? Ultimately, when gentle, patient Patrick can take it no longer and walks out, Martha returns to her parents’ bohemian (AKA dysfunctional) family home in London’s Goldhawk Road and is forced to examine herself more closely. Ever since a “little bomb” exploded in her brain at the age of 17, she’s been on and off antidepressants, generally to little avail. She now loves him back, but seems unable to be happy or even, on occasion, very nice to him. M artha is 40 and finally married to Patrick, a man who’s been secretly in love with her ever since teenagerhood.
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