Click here to listen to Melvyn Bragg talk candidly about Remember Me at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival

“Hindsight will be Satan throughout this account,” Joe Richardson, one of the two central characters in this painfully honest analysis of an intense relationship, tells his daughter Marcelle as he struggles to organise his memories of her mother's life and premature death.

Hindsight, satanic or not, is necessarily at the heart of autobiographical fiction, and Melvyn Bragg has employed it to great effect in his last three novels about Joe's earlier life, growing up in a small Cumbrian town during and immediately after the second world war. In the same way that readers were made to feel that much of what happened to young Joe happened also to young Melvyn, it is difficult to read Remember Me... as anything other than a reworked version of events in the real world.

Joe, the publican's son from Wigton, goes to Wadham College, Oxford. While there, he meets Natasha, an older Frenchwoman, who is studying art and is an au pair. He falls for her immediately and, although she is mired in misery following the collapse of a relationship, his naive passion and persistence win her over. The two marry. After Joe comes down from Oxford, he works as a trainee at the BBC. He publishes fiction that attracts critical attention and is drawn into the glamorous world of film-making as a scriptwriter. Meanwhile Natasha, although she has her own artistic ambitions and publishes a novel, sinks into depression. Analysis fails. The couple separate and attempt to build new lives, but Natasha proves to have a “tidal pull towards self-destruction”. Look at any online or encyclopedia entry for Bragg and the bare bones of Remember Me... are there.

With a novel so clearly autobiographical, especially one by a writer who swims in the goldfish bowl of the media, the reader is constantly tempted into roman-à-clef speculation. Is the flamboyant film director Ken Russell? Who are the models for Joe's television chums? Bragg plays along with this interest. Real and fictional characters interact at parties. Joe's first novel is originally entitled The Kingdom Was Lost. (Bragg's first novel was called For Want of a Nail.) The strength of Remember Me..., however, is that the reader rapidly forgets that temptation to put real names to fictional faces or to worry about the division between the actual and the invented. The story and the characters Bragg provides become enough.

This is a long novel and it sometimes seems as if several kinds of narrative are fighting for attention. One has the innocent, ambitious northerner making his way in the media world and facing up to the alluring but threatening freedoms of the 1960s; another has him encountering the foreign sophistication of his wife's French family and reacting to it. Yet the central structure around which the book is successfully built is the relationship between Joe and Natasha as it moves from first encounter to final tragedy. Both are exiles, Joe from the society in which he grew up, Natasha from the language that shaped her and from her essential self. The story of their exile is told by the one who survived the experience, but its focus is on the one who didn't.

The novel is a record of Joe's (and, we assume, Bragg's) struggle to live with survivor's guilt. Only by re-creating for his daughter some sense of the person her barely remembered mother was can he do so; in doing so, he is obliged to revisit all the desolating emotions he felt at the time. Remember Me... finally becomes a tribute to the ways in which language and imagination attempt to reconstruct the past and a moving acknowledgment of the tormenting power of memory.

Remember Me... by Melvyn Bragg
Sceptre £17.99 pp551

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