This is the fourth in a series of novels in which Melvyn Bragg dissects a fictional life that bears an uncanny resemblance to his own and explores its cultural and psychological contexts.

The previous book, Crossing the Lines, ended in 1959 when Joe Richardson left Cumbria to study at Oxford and subsequently split up with his first love. Now it is a year later and Joe meets Natasha, a French art student in her mid-twenties, who is haunted by her traumatic childhood. He recognises in her “a fellow loneliness” and they become lovers. Unknown to them, they have begun “an embrace to the death”. Joe is looking back at events more than 40 years later and early in the narrative reveals that Natasha will commit suicide.

However, the relationship between their younger selves starts auspiciously enough. After Joe's final exams he and Natasha marry and visit her family in Provence, where her painful memories are anaesthetised by his love. In London he takes up his traineeship with the BBC and she adapts to her role as housewife by being “happy in his happiness”, despite her daytime solitude. They both have literary ambitions (which will be fulfilled) and when he gets home they sit at their kitchen table and write. After a spell in Newcastle they move back to London, where they buy a house in Kew Gardens and Joe's career as a television producer takes off.

It is only after Natasha gives birth to their daughter that things begin to change. Just when Joe seems to have everything he has ever wanted, his self-esteem plummets and he is frustrated by the sense that he is missing out on new opportunities in a city he finds “tempting, enthralling, poisoning, transforming”. Both he and Natasha experience periods of mental instability and struggle with suicidal impulses before undergoing psychoanalysis.

Bragg has himself suffered from depression and as president of the mental health charity Mind has spoken movingly about the suicide of his first wife in 1971. But the interplay of fact and fiction in this novel can sometimes make it seem overly confessional and raises some unsettling questions. To what extent does Bragg identify with the older Joe's condemnation of the “flawed and disturbed man” he used to be or with such feelings as Joe's “deep strike of guilt”?

Whatever the answers, Bragg successfully uses his knowledge of mental illness to explore the subject through his imagination. His descriptions of Natasha's crippling isolation when she fights the “relentless surging tides of darkness” are particularly convincing. Nevertheless, there are some things that are more sketchy, including what Natasha went through as a child. Perhaps this apparent lapse is intended to make a point: such suffering is personal and invisible.

This is a powerful novel that communicates difficult emotional truths. Yet its dark themes are balanced by the vivid portrait it paints of 1960s London and by its evocation of the profound love that outlasts Joe and Natasha's gradual estrangement.

Remember Me by Melvyn Bragg
Sceptre, £17.99

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