Religion is like a jigsaw: it makes a picture out of puzzling chaos

It hardly struck me, as I set out for a couple of days in Somerset, that they would lead me to Bridport in Dorset, thence to Dame Margaret Drabble, to the history of the jigsaw puzzle, and finally to some melancholy reflections on the meaning of life. But of such apparently random pieces are jigsaws made, and sometimes they do make a picture.

We’d seen a day of hurricane-force gales along the south coast last Saturday, when our Somerset hosts remarked that they’d bought tickets for a talk by Margaret Drabble at the Bridport Literary Festival early that evening, and were planning to drive over to the town before supper — and would anyone care to come? Gales notwithstanding, Margaret Drabble was there on time, in a scarlet silk tunic and red shoes. The sweet little 18th-century chapel, now a theatre, was packed for the talk.

Drabble’s subject was her latest book, The Pattern in the Carpet — a Personal History with Jigsaws, published by Atlantic. We were all curious to know what the book might be. A memoir? A textbook on jigsaw puzzles? A history of the author, or of the puzzle?

Something of all these, it turned out. Drabble is a pleasant, thoughtful speaker, and had all our attention as she explained that this was a true story, partly about a difficult woman, her aunt, and partly about how she came, at her aunt’s knee, to love jigsaw puzzles — a bridge between a solitary and unsociable lady, and children. From this starting point the book becomes an idiosyncratic history of the jigsaw puzzle, which turns out (to my surprise) to be an English invention.

But as its author spoke and answered questions, my mind was tending in a different direction: the nature of all those many puzzles where the challenge is to fit things together.