Virginia Woolf once used the idea of patchwork to describe biography, an art which tacks together pieces of stuff with torn edges. Margaret Drabble, instead, chooses the jigsaw puzzle as the controlling metaphor for her new memoir. This book, she tells us, was originally intended as a “harmless” jeu d’esprit on the history of the jigsaw; personal material began to creep in; but then jigsaws reasserted themselves, pushing the autobiographical elements to the edges of the frame. The result is a generically indeterminate work of covert sophistication – “I am not sure what it is”, writes Drabble with deceptive artlessness – whose meandering surface hints at personal depths often too painful to apprehend directly.

The phrase “jigsaw puzzle” was not coined until the late nineteenth century – from the narrow-bladed tool known as a jigsaw, originally designed for cutting fretwork, and fitted to a treadle in the 1870s, allowing for the easier production of the puzzles. The earliest examples, dating from the 1760s, had smooth, rather than interlocking, edges, and were educational aids designed to teach geography. When one of the Bertram sisters ridicules Fanny Price in Mansfield Park for being unable to “put the map of Europe together”, she is referring to just such a puzzle. It is not surprising that the impoverished Price family could not afford one, as the cost of these magnificent “dissected maps” tended to confine their use to upper-class households; they were also considered helpful for teaching young royals about world domination.

One of the earliest jigsaw manufacturers also produced silk kerchiefs printed with maps. Other novelty hankies soon followed – presumably the Chatterton one was for weeping into – and once it was realized that any image could be broken up and reassembled, the scope of the jigsaw itself expanded indefinitely, eventually encompassing, as it does today, images from high art (the Jackson Pollock Drabble mentions sounds particularly terrifying to do). Drabble is no snob, and makes a case for the jigsaw’s art-historical virtues; she had never closely appreciated Constable’s clouds until she had done them in reproduction as a jigsaw. Yet if, for her, jigsaws have a function, it is less pedagogic than therapeutic. Not until page 242 does she tell us that jigsaws “may be connected with depression”. Yet by then, the reader has long since felt that depression is the true subject of this book.

Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy recommended the use of card and board games in the battle against ennui; Boswell urged draughts on Dr Johnson as a similar remedy; Hume turned to backgammon (and cookery) as relief from mental exhaustion; and the rare moments when Drabble’s own parents, both depressive, were “on speaking terms” were when they were doing The Times crossword together. For Drabble herself, it is the jigsaw – which, she tells us, might more worryingly have been called the “fretsaw”, after the tool’s alternative name – that becomes a means, however tenuous, of shoring fragments against our ruin.

Unlike writing novels, which Drabble presents as an open-ended, Sisyphean activity which can cause pain and panic, jigsaws provide an experience of containment, of perfectibility, of being able to control chaos. Drabble ascribes this comforting, optimistic view to her lifelong friend, the children’s literature specialist Nicholas Tucker, but she herself seems more anxious and ambivalent (her mother used to mutter darkly against the easygoing, carefree Tuckers’ failure to carpet their stairs). This ambivalence comes out when she quotes opposing art-historical interpretations of the subject of one of her jigsaws, Brueghel’s “Children’s Games”. Is it a cruel allegory of vanitas or a joyful celebration? The latter view, which even finds happy laughter in the face of a child having its hair pulled, does indeed seem somewhat over-sanguine.

Despite the ludic aspect of puzzles, there is, indeed, tragedy in the Beckettian absurdism of some jigsaw maniacs, such as Bartlebooth in Georges Perec’s La Vie: Mode d’emploi, who devotes his life to painting pictures of harbours with the purpose of turning them into jigsaws which, when completed, will be destroyed. Drabble tells us about an apparent real-life collector, Howard Hardman, who “collects stray jigsaw pieces, found in the street . . . . He doesn’t actually do jigsaw puzzles; he just collects pieces. ‘They have to be on their own, rather than several pieces at once.’ So far he has collected about twenty-five to thirty pieces. One day he may be going to turn them into a work of art”. Drabble goes on with deadpan bathos: “While brooding on his strange habit, I encountered a soggy spread of jigsaw pieces on the edge of a muddy car park in Taunton . . . . Would any of these pieces have been eligible? I don’t think they would”.

Drabble’s own ur-experience with the jigsaw was far from happy. At five, she went for an interview at a Sheffield girls’ prep school where she was given a very babyish puzzle with large pieces, one of which was missing. (In jigsaw lore, the missing piece is as poignant and galling an idea as the land of lost content.) This was presumably just to keep her quiet while the head teacher talked to her mother, but the little girl feared it was a trick, an intelligence test she was bound to fail. Even now, Drabble worries about the psychopathology of her pastime: are adult jigsaw enthusiasts suffering from arrested development, quasi-autism, moral cowardice or aesthetic ineptitude? “Both my parents”, she tells us elsewhere, “often made me feel silly. They wanted us to grow up. They didn’t really like children.” Is the adult Drabble, by engaging in childlike play, silently sticking two fingers up at the judgemental parents who, she says, cared only about exam results? She says she has avoided anger in this book just as Perec avoided the letter E, but she is less successful in her self-denying ordinance than the author of La Disparition.

The reason Drabble prefers jigsaws to board games is the absence of a competitive element. If they stave off boredom and death and depression, they also stave off rivalry, the dangers of which simmer beneath the surface of her narrative. After retiring as a judge, her father published a number of novels, to the competitive fury of her mother. Her sister, the writer A. S. Byatt, was put out when Drabble fictionalized a family tea set in a novel, because she had wanted to use it herself. The ruthlessness, and consequent guilt, of the writer in using family as material – this memoir brutally calls it “abusing” them – is a continual, if buried, preoccupation, particularly in relation to Drabble’s novel The Peppered Moth, with its themes of genetics and depression, and its unflattering fictionalizations of her mother and aunt. The late Auntie Phyl, a fellow doer of jigsaws, is propitiatingly presented here in a more loving light; but she appears to Drabble in a sinister dream as a zombie from the netherworld with no right of redress against the author-abuser.

One wonders whether it is this fear of writer’s treachery, and perhaps of writer’s rivalry, which lies behind Drabble’s announcement – slipped in so slyly that it is barely registered – that she has decided never to write another novel. Yet this supposedly “pleasant” and “inoffensive” memoir, written partly to distract its author from the desperate anxiety of her husband’s cancer, proves as unsettling as fiction. Little Frank, a character in Maria Edgeworth’s Early Lessons, boasts of his jigsaw map that “you cannot see the joining, it fits so nicely”. But Drabble gives us odd disjunctions, where unexplained moments of confession – about an adulterous affair, about her telephone calls to the Samaritans – explode abruptly in the midst of jigsaw scholarship. Fitting together the pieces of one’s own past turns out to have none of the perfectibility of the puzzle. The jigsaw turns out to be a rebuke as well as a comfort. So does this beautiful, subtle book, which distresses as much as it consoles.

Margaret Drabble
THE PATTERN IN THE CARPET
A personal history with jigsaws
350pp. Atlantic Books. £18.99.
978 1 84354 619 1

Lucasta Miller is the author of The Brontë Myth, 2001.

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