Only a Lodger ... and Hardly That: A Fictional Autobiography by Vesna Main (Seagull books)

"I remember", we say. Then we begin to tell our version of what we can recall, filtered by how we felt at the time, what they failed to notice, the knowledge of what followed. Our memories must always contain some element of invention. So, it is immediately honest of Vesna Main to subtitle her novel, "A Fictional Autobiography" and an indication of the method she will use in setting out to trace how her antecedents and upbringing impacted on her life and the decisions she made; the rebellious impulses she favoured and the many ways in which she feels she failed.

The form in which Main introduces the early years of a character referred to in the third person, is remarkable, both in the details she presents and the way she presents them. The girl's mother is rigid in her expectations and obsessive in her need for cleanliness, afraid that the smallest amount of dirt would result in the death of her daughter. Those she lives among are all too often inadequate for the perfect-in-ever-way person she needs to be. Both mother and daughter wear clothes that make it clear they are better than their surroundings and the people who live there.

"Her mother's high heels are too impractical for the rocky ground of the small provincial town where only the main street and a few neighbouring ones in the very centre were paved. Her mother's clothes and shoes are ignoring the landscape just like her mother is ignoring everyone around, not looking at anyone, not talking to anyone as if her mother wanted to pretend, pretend to herself, that the family were back in the capital among fashionable friends."

Early in her life, "not yet four", the girl learns that affection will only be delivered if certain expectations are met and questions answered in a manner that gives satisfaction. Again, and again we learn that the girl was expected to recall poems from her faulty, immature memory. Failure to do so resulted - as frequently became the case - in the girl having to sit in the corner of the kitchen, on an A4 sheet paper facing the wall. The repetition of an assertion that her mother was not being cruel becomes like a desperate need for assurance that this was indeed acceptable and always done with the best of intentions. The much-desired affection is not freely given by either parent but, "there was no point wishing to have been hugged and comforted because that was kitsch - the word her mother had introduced her to early on". Looking back now, the narrator tries to rationalise and mitigate her parent's behaviour because "what was the point of wishing that some things were different when they had passed and there was nothing one could do to change them". But is she any more convinced than we are? The ice has been lodged, the Larkinish damage done. How will she ever be loved?

Years later a sculptor tells her, "your face has an interesting shape, the shape that says you will never be happy." Is there any escaping these evaluations, denunciations and condemnations? Would love, if given, turn out to be just another confinement? Main's considerations and interrogations yield to a weary and wary understanding. Would it be better to not remember at all? She tells a story about a person visiting a writer whose memory has gone who, in response to words of sympathy says that "not remembering his life was a good thing, a very good thing - a silver lining."

After a lengthy first chapter in which these life-shaping matters are considered in dense blocks of prose, there is an immediate brightness to the second chapter. There is air around the words spread sparsely across the pages. Lightness and weightlessness become central as the narrator's grandmother tells her fantastic tales of flying through the air with a circus acrobat who, like the mother and daughter in the previous chapter, wears white gloves, but not, in his case, to set himself apart. "Only the mind can conquer gravity", he says. Perhaps the dead weight of the past can be loosened and left to fall away? No, only the oblivion of that writer can separate us from all that is contained in memories. We are what we became in those early years and even love cannot wholly change our bonds to that time even if we physically escape. Memory saturates us like a wafer absorbing wine.

Chapter Three, "The Dead" brings us the narrator's other, far more austere, fatigued grandmother, a woman whose husband returns from the second World War on foot, halts outside his home and then, resumes walking. He changes his name to Pavel and "is lost in the crowd". On just one occasion is he seen by his granddaughter: at a graveyard where his wife is mourning for him at the communal grave where she is sure he has been buried. A transcendent moment occurs, fleeting in its impact, and is gone. For Pavel, the example of Mary Carleton, an Englishwoman of the 17th century, who adapted many personalities provides an example and a justification for his abandonment of his family. "He was no longer woken at night by voices telling him that he was traitor to have abandoned his family, a failed father and husband, an unreliable human being who had no heart and deserved no love." Every Christmas he sends his children carefully chosen books, never saying by whom they have been sent.

For a chapter called, "The Poet", the narrator closely examines some photographs which are included in the book. Each contains an image of her grandfather and the special property of each photo has a resonance which pushes against the belief of her other grandfather - the one who became Pavel - that photographs hide "by pretending to show . . . both processes, taking pictures and looking at them, try to assuage our fear of death." For her, the mystery of a photograph is how a banal subject can become, with time, weighted with meaning. Death, or the realisation that one is now older than the relative one is looking at, reframes the meaning of a photo. The expression caught in that moment is asked to yield a depth of meaning that would not have been thought of at the time the image was first viewed. Now the fixed moment must tell us what we need to know or what we need to believe.

In the final chapter, a first-person narrator relays the unintentionally amusing story of his pursuit of Maria - the woman who said she had flown through the sky with an acrobat - uninhibited by the big age difference between them and certain that sharing with her his enthusiasm for stamp collecting will win her heart. Unfortunately, she is a reader of books and thus has, in every sense, other ideas. "Too much reading. Not good for a woman", he concludes.

Across five stylistically diverse chapters, Vesna Mian tells us stories about those whose actions and decisions, loves and deficiencies, fantasies and hardships led to her becoming a person who can write a book in which memory is challenged to reveal fractured, imperfect truths. Through a complexity of voices and perspectives, she has created a deep and beautiful work of speculative autobiography, one which always acknowledges the essential fiction of our own memories.