Things My Mother Never Told Me by Blake Morrison

A labour of love from a true mummy's boy

"Did my mother have to die before I started getting to know her?" It is often the case that only when your parents are gone do they become a presence in your life. Blake Morrison's memoir of his father, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, was a remarkable feat of resuscitation, of intensive care. Dr Arthur Morrison was a dominating personality, a man whose "only disease was unbounded optimism". His life created a narrative as vital and extravagant as its subject. Blake Morrison, the dreamer poet, captured the robustness of a man at ease with the physical and described his death with a clinical precision.

In his new book, Morrison performs the tender science of surgery on his mother's less fevered but no less interesting life. She is more elusive and carries "a tumour of sadness, a spot on her heart". Born Agnes O'Shea in Ireland, the 19th of 20 children and uneasy with the taint of peasant ignorance, she re-christened herself Kim – a name suggested by her future husband, a "sexless, rootless name that buries the woman she was". It was an act of self-effacement that characterised her life.

She qualified as a doctor and, during the Second World War, became a valued paediatrician in the poorer inner-city areas of war-torn England. She comes alive during this period, taking great risks as cities are bombed and unwanted pregnancies demand stealth and compassion. Meanwhile, Arthur is increasingly bored on inactive service as an RAF doctor in the Azores, treating the occasional venereal case or sprained ankle sustained by a drunk officer.

Their courtship is told through a series of letters, thousands of which were written in response to the fracture and distance of war. Morrison admits that his father's endless garrulity crowds out his mother: "let her get a word in", he interjects. She is evasive and self-contained, and when she writes of evenings with other men, his responses are a crossfire of jealousy and suspicion.

After the war, they marry and set up a medical practice together, but Kim is a sleeping partner. Arthur refuses to allow her to pursue a career, insisting she enjoy the fruits of leisure and motherhood, which soon sour into a profound sense of futility. She is a "quiet shadow at the edge of his glaring sun" and, when he becomes infatuated with another woman, she falls into despair.

Morrison painstakingly creates a portrait of a post-war middle-class family. It may be a familiar one, but his prose has the diamond cut of a poet's eye, and his story is suffused with warmth and longing.

The narrative itself is diffuse, kaleidoscopic. His mother fades in and out of focus; she is slippery, hard to hold. She wears a series of masks; the "real her" cannot be identified and may not exist. He says of his attempt to reclaim his mother: "though certain to fail, I want to fail with honour." Far from failing, he has brought her vividly to life in an outstanding work of family literature.