Grace and Mary by Melvyn Bragg review

This 'strongly autobiographical' novel about losing a parent to dementia could only have been written by Bragg

Melvyn Bragg talked in a Guardian interview last year about his mother Mary's death from dementia and the "strongly autobiographical" novel he had written about her. The fictional Mary's decline and her son John's attempts to hold on to the remaining slivers of Mary's identity are conveyed here with documentary realism, recognisable to anyone who has lost a parent to the disease. Interwoven with John's visits to Mary is the story of Grace, who fell pregnant in 1917 and gave birth to an illegitimate daughter Mary. Both strands are simply but compellingly told and there is a poignant tension in the impossibility, now, of John's broaching the subject of Grace with Mary, even though he feels this might reconnect her to reality. If Bragg's name were removed from the book, he would surely be the sole candidate for its authorship: only he, with the massive doses of "learning" he ingests for each episode of In Our Time (not to mention his other projects), could cover David Hume and the big bang on the same page, or quote an "early pope" in a description of a pie and pea supper. For this we love him dearly.