Patrick is sweet-natured, self-effacing, shy and very much drawn in by Martha’s self-possession and fierce intelligence.īy what’s really at the heart of the novel is the illness that has been with Martha since her childhood: a cyclical, crushing depression that has left her, at times, unable to do anything but lie in small, dark spaces (“like a small animal that instinctively knows it’s dying”) for weeks or months at a time.
Patrick has indeed been in Martha’s life for as long as an old sofa – first coming to her family’s Christmas lunch when he was 13, accompanying a cousin from the boarding school they both attended because Patrick’s absent father has forgotten to book him a flight home.įrom this beginning, he very much becomes a part of Martha’s extended family, taken under the wing of her wealthy and exacting aunt Winsome, who hosts these Christmas lunches each year in her central London home. Sorrow and Bliss – Meg Mason’s debut novel – is narrated in the aftermath of Martha and Patrick’s separation, when Martha is thinking back over her life and trying to understand it, and herself.
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