Review: Two Sisters, Blake Morrison, The Borough Press

The Borough Press, £16.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

Tolstoy’s adage – that while all happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way – is as true today as when it was first pronounced. Truth is what motivated the author of Anna Karenina, so much so that he resisted attempts to market it as a novel.

For him, it was essentially a book about family life. In writing it he hoped not only to intrigue readers but to resolve problems – domestic and artistic – of his own. As John Bayley has said, “It was no longer a question of looking for a subject that interested him, but of one that obsessed him.”

While not, quite, on Tolstoy’s level, Blake Morrison shares his obsession. Initially known as a poet, he came to wider public prominence in 1993 with the publication of his memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father?, in which he described, often in excruciating detail, a man whose capacity for embarrassing his son was boundless.

Next came Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002) in which Morrison turned his gaze on a woman from a large Catholic Irish family who tolerated her husband’s long affair with a close family friend.

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Now we have Two Sisters, which Morrison is reluctant to call the third part of a trilogy. This time the subjects are his sister Gill and half-sister Josie. Asked by a friend about the book he is writing he says, as if listing trigger warnings, its themes include “alcoholism, suicide, blindness, depression and grief...” “Jesus,” the friend replies, “who’ll want to read that?”

He has a point. Though Morrison insists that Two Sisters is not a misery memoir – “that most despicable of genres” – there’s no denying that it has a fair dollop of miserableness. Guilt, too.

While not sparing Gill and Josie, he is even harder on himself, constantly wondering whether he could have done more to save his younger siblings. Gill, an alcoholic, drank herself to death after a lifetime of feeling inadequate and unloved. Josie, meanwhile, the unacknowledged product of her mother Beaty’s affair with Morrison’s father, may have committed suicide after tampering with her insulin pump. With a nod to Oscar Wilde, Morrison remarks, “To lose one sister may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.”

A remorseful tone is cast over Two Sisters like a dense cloud about to burst. Gill is the focus of the majority of its pages. We first encounter her when Blake, together with his wife and their two children, pays a post-Christmas visit to Yorkshire where he was brought up. What is hoped will be a happy gathering of the Morrison clan is its opposite.

Blake Morrison and his sister Gill (Image: free)

For Gill the only way of coping with the situation is to get blind drunk. While everyone else is indoors she is hiding in the garage nursing her wrath with a box of Liebfraumilch. “What’s happened, Gill,” asks Blake. “Don’t you see you’re killing yourself.”

“I’m unhappy,” she replies. “Always have been. That won’t ever change.”

The problem, she adds, is not the drink but Blake and her mum and dad. “They gave you everything and me nothing. You got out. I didn’t. You’ve got a life. You turn up here twice a year and then bugger off and never think about the rest of us the rest of the time. You can’t stand them any more than I can.”

What follows is a valiant, searing and affecting attempt to unpack such diatribes. Gill’s formative years, Morrison insists, not entirely convincingly, were mostly happy but things began to go awry when she sat the eleven-plus exam, which he passed but she failed. Though her parents told her this was no disgrace it marked a point of divergence between the siblings.

As a consequence Gill was packed off to a boarding school which compounded her unhappiness. Overweight, lonely and bullied, she was invariably the last to be picked for games. All she wanted was to go unnoticed but that didn’t happen. As the years passed the slough of despond deepened.

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During a brief interlude in London she stole from her flatmates and when her father found out he locked her in a cellar for 36 hours. “How could he have been so crude – so medieval and barbaric – in his methods,” writes Morrison. “And why did Mum allow it?’ Eventually Gill married and had children, and while she was a good mother her drinking grew worse. Once her husband locked her in a bedroom to stop her getting at drink but she climbed out of the window and across the roof. Her daughter, who was having a piano lesson at the time, looked out and saw her mother’s hand dangling from the gutter above the window. It would be funny if it were not so tragic.

Compounding Gill’s sense of alienation was the arrival on the scene of Beaty and her daughter Josie, who would holiday with the Morrisons and visit them at weekends while Beaty’s husband looked after his pub. Such an arrangement seemed guaranteed to cause hurt but Blake’s father, a doctor, seems to have carried it off with insensitive aplomb.

Was Josie his daughter? DNA tests, which she asked Blake to take, proved she was. Speculating on why Josie took her own life, he writes: “Would it have happened if her mum had been alive? Or if Dad – my, her, our dad – had been? If she’d called him, would he have done more to help than I did?”

The questions are rhetorical. No one can say what might have happened had circumstances been different. True to his calling, Blake Morrison seeks solace and enlightenment in literature but these passages, in which he explores the relationships of Dorothy and William Wordsworth and Charles and Mary Lamb among others, while interesting, tend to divert attention from his two sad sisters.

Why, he asks, like so many people who have alcoholics in their circle, did Gill drink? He lists “some tentative becauses”, none of which is much help. “Because? There is no because.”