[Birch is a novelist. In the following highly favorable review, she praises Morrissy's characterization and thematic focus in Mother of Pearl, describing it as an "acute, elegiac first novel."]

In Mary Morrissy's acute, elegiac first novel [Mother of Pearl] she returns to territory familiar from her collection of stories, A Lazy Eye—illness, alienation, the emotional ambivalence of parenthood, the dangers of bargaining with God. There were one or two gems there, but even the most successful tended to suffer from a sense of having tried to do too much for the genre. With this novel, however, she spreads her wings.

Several writers have explored the theme of babysnatching in recent years but no one else has tackled it with quite so much sympathy and sophistication. This is an emotional minefield, but Morrissy is clear-sighted. The characters all have their reasons. They all want to be happy. None of them is bad. Their constellation just happens to map out tragedy.

"Baby Spain" is a few weeks old when she is abducted from the maternity unit where, premature, she has been receiving special care. Four years later, she is found living happily with her new "parents" and returned to her real mother. We approach this tangled web from every angle: that of the abductor, the real parents and the child, grown to womanhood.

There is a rich succession of characters, sensitively portrayed: Stanley Godwin, husband of the babysnatcher and the ageing innocent; Mel Spain, the irresponsible young father who "missed the boat" literally and figuratively; and Rita, the mother, torn between buried relief, guilt and horror at her baby's disappearance. When her child reappears, Rita has mentally buried her and given birth to another. She becomes "the mother of three": the second, established child, the grieved baby, and a four-year-old stranger "who had been suckled by wolves".

It is in this child, Mary—grown up and unaware of her strange beginnings—that Morrissy explores the intricate interplay between memory and dream, fantasy and reality, conscious and unconscious. All of this is skillfully and yearningly evoked.

For Mary, it's as if a past life echoes inside her, a dim primeval longing for a lost Eden and her "first parents, Adam and Eve". But the book's feet are firmly on the ground. Adam and Eve are Stanley and Irene, an impotent shipyard worker and his wife, a lonely, withdrawn woman with a history of illness, abandonment and institutionalization. In the brief inklings that memory allows to trickle down, we see a world of lost warmth, of buttons done up wrong by clumsy hands, of muddy boots on oilcloth and the carving of a loaf by workworn hands: "the steady thrum of identical days". We see the ghost-child, focus of love, "on her wooden throne". Half remembered, half believed in, she can never be pinned down, only glimpsed: "a dark child grasping at the air for a mother's hand".

Mary Morrissy builds an intricate picture, layer on layer, with an energy and absolute conviction that grips after the first, bleak 25 pages or so. Unsentimental, powerfully emotional, even-handed and generous, the novel has a rare compulsive quality. It's extremely unusual for a book to bring tears to my eyes these days, but Mother of Pearl managed it on the very last page, quite taking me by surprise. It is a very fine novel indeed and deserves wide recognition.