Winnie's weird wobbly world

Fiction:Winnie is old, lost, hurt beyond belief and possibly insane. If she is mad, though, it was life that did it to her, her life, a horror sequence of cruel events.

This is a story with little relief. But it is all made wonderfully bearable by the sheer grace of the writing. Remember Me, Trezza Azzopardi's second novel, follows a strong début, The Hiding Place, a novel about a Maltese family in Cardiff. Its anger and candour took one by surprise. Even more surprising, it found itself on the Booker shortlist in 2000.

In The Hiding Place, memory shaped the narrative, as it does this time. But there is a difference. The first novel began with a sharp if random memory but then it became a type of investigation, the slow recreation of a family history on the way to supplying some answers. It was an approach that caused the story to creak at times.

Effort marked that first novel. It was easy to see the ways in which technique can sit too heavily on a story. This time, the effort is well concealed. There are no seams.

Winnie, if that's her name, after all, her name has been changed many times throughout her life, has had no chances. Not even her mistakes are her own. Her dodgy father proves little use. Her mother dies young and, disengaged from life, was always preoccupied by the army of ghosts that dogged her. Granddad is not exactly a saviour and the only hope of an 11th-hour childhood comes from the lodger, Mr Stadnik, whose imagination provides Winnie with her only toy, a glove puppet named Gloria. Stadnik has stories and some charm.

But all is short-lived. Happiness is not a state intended for Winnie. Bullied and jeered, - even her hair is her enemy - she is overwhelmed by a series of mishaps and is never allowed to become herself.

Azzopardi's achievement lies in her successful if unlikely balancing of the beautiful and the unbearable. Somehow, the story never collapses into a total account of woe. Instead, the narrative has the feel of discovery. In old age, a chance violation spurs Winnie on to the impossible - an attempt to discover herself, her past, the mess that made her what she is.

It is not a lament, more a surprise piecing together. Fragments help her inch back in time and recreate a sense of personal history.

There was the stay in the country. War meant Winnie was evacuated. So off she went as a little girl to Aunt Ena, an unhappy dreamer desperate for late romance at all costs. Winnie never judges, she is remembering and in the act of remembering, she is finding herself, relocating a life that went on without her really noticing. Winnie's own stab at romance with the brother of a bullying schoolgirl who has tormented her has predictable results.

Abuse, exploitation, denials and accusations shape the tiny world that is Winnie's prison. Everything is recalled, eventually, with the weird clarity of a scrambled dream. How could anything be so tragic and inconsequential? Life is. Remember Me could be a dreary experience yet it is not - only because Azzopardi writes so well. She gives the horror lightness because in Winnie she has created a character who has become too shell-shocked to actually register the grief and anger she should be feeling.

Yet, there is a catch. This is a graceful, charming and at times, self consciously literary work. Azzopardi has given Winnie, a girl who spent little time in school and most of her adult life locked away, the voice of a poet with a feel for surreal imagery. While the narrative beguiles, it also leaves one wondering at the artistry and its impact on the narrative voice. Memory for Winnie becomes an act of beauty.

But where does truth come in? Or does this matter? This suspension of truth presents a problem - it makes the reader wonder at the extent to which Azzopardi is allowing us to witness her pulling the strings.

Yet, Winnie is never quite a complete puppet such is the sympathy she earns. Her life, with its litany of hurts and losses, is tragically unfair. Although neither a villain nor a saint, she is a likable heroine, though never quite believable, nor even particularly original, caught as she is by a cast of stereotypes.

Ultimately the several ambiguities are countered by Azzopardi's skilful and confident assembly of strange happenings, vivid recollections and more than a few coincidences.

Remember Me is evocative, atmospheric and far more beautiful than it should be. These qualities ensure it compels without being fully convincing.

Remember Me By Trezza Azzopardi Picador, 261pp. £16.99

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times