Sarah Hartley: Mrs P's Journey

By DAVID LARSEN

If there is a scene, or a word, or a character, you believe to be too fantastical, it is likely they are real." Welcome to the new standard of biographical accuracy.

There's a lot to like about this book, in which Sarah Hartley brings to life vibrantly an unlikely historical character, but I'm glad I'm not a bookshop-owner faced with deciding where to shelve it. Under non-fiction? Not quite, but it isn't fiction. Is there a section for postmodern quasi-biography?

However you label it, Hartley's book is lively and fun to read. She set out to write it after hearing about the death of one Phyllis Pearsall, creator of the London A-Z map.

"So, I remember thinking to myself, a woman put together the cabby's bible, the book that lies on every Londoner's bookshelf. Who says we can't read maps?"

Looking into Phyllis Pearsall's story, Hartley made three key discoveries. First, Pearsall didn't just map London, she did it in the most quixotic way possible.

Unable to drive, and with no personal expertise as a cartographer, she spent 1935 walking the streets of London - all of them - with a sketch pad. Somehow, she produced a useable map.

Second, for Phyllis Pearsall, deciding to spend a year walking up and down a strange city doing something she had been told would never work was fairly typical.

Her parents were strong characters, an immigrant Hungarian Jew and an Irish-Italian Catholic whose troubled marriage ultimately collapsed.

She grew up with so many conflicting expectations imposed on her that she essentially had to choose between becoming a cypher and a rebel.

She became a rebel, a complex, interesting one, forever trying to please her warring parents even as she refused to do what either of them demanded of her.

Among other things - and this is the third key fact about her for a biographer - she became an inveterate self-mythologiser, making an artform out of the anecdote and spinning endless tales about her own past.

All of which presents Hartley with a wealth of fascinating material, and one major problem: how do you sort the truth from the lies? Her solution is to be endlessly credulous.

"I have written the truth according to Phyllis. For I am convinced that every story, every memory, and every encounter she described, she believed to be true."

The result is an odd compound of known history, reliable guesswork and invention, with the dividing lines vague at best. It reads like a novel, which is just as well, because it is much closer than most biographies to being one.

Pocket Books

$24.95