Grief that never truly ends

The eighth novel by English writer Helen Dunmore deals with grief, yet it isn’t a story of healing and redemption. Instead, “Mourning Ruby” is about learning to live with profound loss without actually getting over it.

The grief that Rebecca, the narrator, must endure is perhaps the worst kind: the death of a child. As the novel opens, she describes her mother’s failure to care for her, which leaves Rebecca determined to be a good mother herself someday. It is 1965 when we meet the newborn Rebecca, who is left outside an Italian restaurant in a men’s size 11 shoebox. She is rescued by Lucia, a woman who doesn’t much like babies -- “She knew far too much about them for that.” It is a practical impulse, not maternal instinct, that leads Lucia to bring the shoebox baby to the local police, but “[n]ot for a second did it occur to Lucia to keep me,” says Rebecca.

When she is finally adopted, it’s not into a happy home. Her adoptive mother reminds her repeatedly that she and her husband had hoped to adopt a little boy next, but she “was such a difficult baby that it put them off.” It’s clear, then, why Rebecca spends the rest of her life learning to find familial bonds in other less conventional ways, and why the sudden loss of her young daughter -- struck and killed by a car at 5 -- seems especially tragic.

On the whole, “Mourning Ruby” is an absorbing novel that brims with intensity. As Dunmore has proven in previous novels, such as “Talking to the Dead,” she isn’t a writer who shies from tough or scary subject matter. In her latest, though, she adds subplots that detract somewhat from the narrative rather than enrich it.

One involves her best friend, Joe, with whom she shares a flat in London before getting married. Joe is writing a novel set during World War I that is vaguely based on his and Rebecca’s tattered family histories. Passages of his work in progress are included in the book, and although they serve to make a point about how we can empower ourselves by writing our own life stories, they add little. Joe’s extensive notes to Rebecca on “story development” seem even more superfluous. (“Will’s not a boy. He’s a man in his mid-thirties. He’s thickset and he’s got gray in his hair.”) Another distracting story line is that of Mr. Damiano, Rebecca’s kind hotelier boss, whose background is revealed at length, including the fact that he grew up among circus performers.

The best moments in “Mourning Ruby” deal with Rebecca’s complicated relationship with Joe, whom she regards as a soul mate but who wants more than she can give; their scenes together show how platonic bonds can form the best kinds of family relationships. Dunmore displays her skills as an empathetic, keenly perceptive storyteller in detailing the frail state of Rebecca’s marriage to her doctor husband, Adam, after Ruby’s death.

Dunmore provides a chilling account of the grieving process -- one that never truly ends, as she describes it -- and of how ill equipped many are to comfort those in mourning: “People would call us at home and say, ‘Adam, are you all right? You sound different,’ ” says Rebecca. “We learned that it only took two or three months after Ruby’s death for people to begin asking us if we were all right.”

Few novels have addressed grief in quite the same way; “Mourning Ruby” is a reminder that death is another societal taboo, like sex or money. Dunmore pointedly notes that people who haven’t endured loss seem almost embarrassed by it. Immersed in her grief, Rebecca realizes quickly that she has no one to turn to, because no one wants to -- or is able to -- deal with the depth of her pain. Eventually, the intensity of her sadness dissolves into numbness: “The days were nothing anymore. I had to get through them and I understood why Ruby wasn’t there in them.” Rebecca learns to live for nighttime, when Ruby visits her in dreams.

Dunmore gives her characters glimmers of hope at the novel’s end but little more, and it is that clear-eyed candor that makes the novel so good and so bittersweet. There is no sentimentality or nostalgia. Instead, the author has written about life’s ellipses -- all that is unresolved and often unbearably painful -- without filling in all the blanks: the ways we miss loved ones, brood over the past, yearn for a sense of wholeness. In doing so, Dunmore has made a brave choice, or at the very least an authentic one.