Last updated 13:40, Thursday, 03 April 2008

Joe Richardson, Wigton scholarship boy made good in the Oxford University of the Fifties and now mixing it with the literary/media intelligentsia in London, is having an early evening drink in a pub and discussing the ways of the world and provincial novels.

Remember Me by Melvyn Bragg. Sceptre. RRP £17.99

“The carnival’s moved on,” he’s told by a sharp American poet. His friend defends him: “Joe thinks you can find all human life in Wigton, don’t you, Joe?”

Joe responds with a glib quote from Rabbie Burns on man’s common humanity and goes off to buy a drink.

Melvyn Bragg has moved a long, long way from Wigton, almost as far as anyone can, but his title, Lord Bragg of Wigton, exemplifies how clearly he feels the integrity of his own life, and the strong sense of rootedness he still feels.

Unlike the American poet he described, Bragg has avoided the blandishments of fashion, to continue writing strong, straightforward narrative fiction securely anchored in the world he knows.

Remember Me takes the story of Joe Richardson a decade or so further forward from the three previous volumes which have told of Joe’s childhood and adolescence.

The novel begins with Joe in Oxford, somewhat gauche and out-of-place, but eagerly mugging up at the last minute for essays, writing film reviews and being involved in the full swing of student life.

He starts courting (the old-fashioned term is correct) a French girl, Natasha.

He is the ardent pursuer, buying flowers, arranging cinema trips, even promoting a very successful exhibition of her drawings and etchings.

She is diffident, removed, somewhat lost in a foreign country, recovering from a difficult affair and coming to terms with a complex, largely loveless childhood.

“Much later,” we are told, “when she was brooding yet again on their beginnings, she came to believe that Joe’s first awkward visit may well have helped save her.”

They marry, move to London, to Kew beneath the persistent irritation of the flight-path to Heathrow, and have a daughter.

He moves in the bright worlds of radio and television, writes well-received novels, and she paints and also writes but with less success.

We watch the disintegration of the bond between them that Joe had so carefully nurtured.

The novel is written as though it is seen through Joe’s eyes.

In places Joe is shown as writing for his daughter to help her understand her mother, to see their life as it was, to redeem himself.

“He saw the truth of it when the depression came back – shame reappeared as clearly as the mark of Cain.

The shame had poisoned him, but it was a poison he deserved and his system learned to live with it though at a price.”

Remember Me is a courageous book. A novelist must draw on his own life and experiences. When his subject involves the most disturbing of our emotions, the ones that make us question ourselves continually, a writer will usually choose to distance himself from his own experience, to relive the emotions in another time and place so as to distance himself.

Remember Me seems to have little distance. There are areas, understandably, where questions remain unanswered, things are left unsaid.

The novel is truthful because Melvyn Bragg has the nerve to look directly at a life equivalent to his own and to describe it with honesty and conviction.

There are sentimentalities, notably his parents, a honeymoon cottage in Caldbeck, a sense of “Northernness”, but where this novel really matters, in the story of the relationship between Joe and Natasha, it is distinguished by its honesty, clarity and openness.

This is a very fine and rare achievement for any novelist.

We are given one warning: “Fiction can be treacherous, especially when read as fact.” Remember Me may not have the actuality of real life, but, in coming to an understanding of his own life, Melvyn Bragg offers us a deeply moving experience.

It is a privilege to read such a book.