In the vicarage.

Bad Blood
Lorna Sage
William Morrow, $24.95, 281 pp.

Despite the proliferation of memoir in the past decade, it seems safe to say that there are readers still who prefer the manipulation of fact and fancy inherent in fiction over the memoir's more sedate, if solid, reassurance that the story being told really happened. Such readers--and I count myself among them--will find great pleasure, and some pain, in this memoir by the late British literary critic Lorna Sage. It is an intelligent and beautifully written work. To call a memoir brutally honest seems de rigueur--brutal honesty being the incentive for most memoirs--but Bad Blood's honesty is remarkable not so much because of what it reveals about the underside of midcentury, middle-class British life, but because it does so in a way that is free of the fictional techniques--wholly reenacted scenes and conversations, unbelievably precise detail, an impossible claim of total recall--that edge so many memoirs dangerously close to what might be called (to be brutally honest) lying. Bad Blood is a memoir that actually sounds like memory, and it is the wisdom and authenticity of Sage's recollections--as well as her understanding that a memoir is not a nonfiction novel--that makes her book all the more appealing.

It helps, of course, that she has a few good, marvelously dysfunctional relatives to call on. Chief among them--whose "long shadow" casts itself over the entire work--is her grandfather, the disappointed vicar of a remote church on the Welsh border. A drinker, a womanizer, a bitter romantic, he is young Lorna's first mentor, and the book's most vivid and memorable character. (The author was named, by him, after the heroine of Lorna Doone.) "He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times when he came home pissed and incapable."

Grandma herself is an angry exile in this "dead-alive dump" of a village, never leaving the vicarage except to return to South Wales and the scenes of her idyllic girlhood. "She thought men and women belonged to different races and any getting together was worse than folly. The 'old devil'...had talked her into marriage and the agony of bearing two children...she would quiver with rage when she remembered her fall. She was short (about four foot ten) and as fat and soft-fleshed as he was thin and leathery, so her theory of separate races looked quite plausible."

With her father away at war, Lorna lives with this Dickensian pair and her quiet mother, spending her early years as a vicarage child, her claims to "specialness" being "books, the church, and my fund of creepy stories--Grandpa's gifts." But Grandpa leaves another gift as well, his diaries from 1933 and 1934. "Reading these diaries turned out to be a bit like eavesdropping on the beginnings of my world...how life in the vicarage got its Gothic flavor, how we became so isolated from respectability, how the money started not to make sense...how my grandfather took on the character of theatrical martyrdom." The tale these diaries tell is full of betrayal and lust, romance and hopelessness, but also of the ordinary days of a country vicar. They offer, as Sage writes, "the awful knowledge that when they're not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless." Sage makes good use of her expertise as a literary critic in interpreting her grandfather's writing, and it is her analysis that makes the raw material of his life so compelling. "His secrets are like the secrets of a character delivering a stage soliloquy who 'doesn't know' he has an audience. Grandpa was always writing for Grandma in a certain sense...he was writing for me, too, reaching out a scrawny hand across the years."

Ironically, the diaries are also the means by which Grandma exacts her revenge. "If he refused to produce the cash that lined her luggage, paid for her outings...and fed the National Savings account she eventually put in my name...then she would take the damning documents to the bishop, threaten scandal and divorce, and lose him even the rotten living he had."

With the return of her father from the war, the move out of the vicarage to a postwar council house, and then the death of her grandfather, Lorna Sage's childhood, and her memoir, take a decidedly ordinary turn. Exiled herself by the birth of her younger brother, she becomes a kind of wild child in the fields and byways of her village, resisting her parents' attempts at postwar respectability. The keen eye and the eloquence of the literary critic are still at work here in this half of the book, but the material is more familiar. There's her hardworking father, raised during the Depression, coming to manhood--and a kind of success he will never quite duplicate--as a soldier, and then running a business whose "main purpose was to support the myth of my father as his own man." There's her mother, whose ineptitude as a housewife both defies the 1950s stereotype and increases, for her husband, her childish charm. And then Lorna herself, shy, intelligent, plagued with braces, and sinus infections that render her an insomniac, and thus, a voracious reader. "Grandma may have lived with us in the flesh, mumbling sponge cake and wheezing, but Grandpa was still around too. He emerged like a genie from a bottle whenever I communed with the dandyish and despairing characters in his leftover library."

Her teenage years cover some familiar territory as well, the delights and the tyrannies of girls' friendships, clothes and school, sexual awakening, rock 'n' roll, all of it recounted with Sage's exuberance and wit, and her own brand of bitterness. Her redemption, her triumph over all that threatened to defeat her, including a scandalous pregnancy that is itself part Gothic nightmare, part fairy tale, comes in the form of her escape to university. There she recognizes in her professor, in "the brilliance, the theatricality, the edge of bitterness," her grandfather, her first mentor, "as I'd never known him, in his prime."

And it is here, perhaps, at the end of her tale, that this lovely memoir might cause some pain among those of us who prefer fiction's freer hand with facts. For it is here that Sage's redemption, and triumph, seem both self-congratulatory and shallow--pitfalls, no doubt, of any recounting of one's own version of things. Those of us who, like Sage herself, love and admire the spell of fiction, may well wonder if, unfettered by the exigencies of relating what really happened, Lorna Sage would have found in her material redemption not only for herself ("we broke the rules and got away with it"), but for her sad parents, her terrible grandparents, and for the society and place that formed them all.

Alice McDermott's fifth novel, Child of My Heart, will be published in November. She won the National Book Award for Charming Billy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).