Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain review – a lost first love

This delicate novel follows the awakening of a young woman, from 1950s country house parties to not-so-swinging London and an unhappy marriage.

At one point in this slim coming-of-age novel, Rose Tremain’s 17th, the main character, Marianne, is accused by her husband Hugo of being “a damn hard person to like.” Marianne is genuinely concerned. She married him more than ten years earlier when she was only twenty. It’s the early 1970s, Hugo runs an auction house in London and they’re in Paris – Marianne has been patiently looking at model puppet theaters all day. She does her utmost, she thinks. And then it dawns on her that her very best “resembled the antics of some stricken species of creature, like a sick gray parrot in a cage.” Kind Hugo, a huge, red-haired, horse-loving family friend, adores her. They still call each other by teenage nicknames, sparked by the fact that they once dressed up together in shaggy fur coats: he is ‘Anthracite’, and she is ‘Yeti’. But as Marianne wanders through the city, all she can think about is her first love: the handsome Simon, who moved to Paris long ago.

The novel begins in the 1950s when Marianne is 15 and meets Simon at a country house party in Berkshire. Tremain, now 80, has clearly mined her own adolescence to create an authentic middle-class environment of parties in rattling country houses where girls dance to Tommy Steele, sip cider cups, and pause for ‘cold collations’ of chicken feet and coleslaw. Simon is an 18-year-old boy with floppy hair who attends Marlborough school and is taking his entrance exams for Oxford. Marianne loses her virginity in the back seat of his baby blue Morris Minor. Tremain isn’t often thought of as a funny writer, but she can be brilliantly wry. When Simon takes her home, Marianne’s father, an ex-army colonel, tells him about the car. “It’s damn good, huh?” Simon mumbles that it is his first car. “Weak couple,” the colonel snaps.

Back at her girls’ boarding school in Hertfordshire, where the starched matrons and the thermometers have been baptized in Dettol, Marianne’s obsession escalates. Tremain nails the fiery madness of adolescent love. Marianne remembers the “intoxicating” smell of her post-coital panties; she can’t eat or concentrate and sees letters formed by his small handwriting as ‘angels’ on the page. “I lost control,” she realizes wildly. She tells Simon that she will always love him: “Absolutely and forever.”

But at the age of 19, in 1963, Marianne was studying at a secretariat in Kensington. Life in London is anything but swinging. She is lonely and miserable, pining for Simon; her skin cracks. On Kings Road, she passes women in “little slanted boxes like skirts,” “lonely gazelles” with candy-pink lips, and men with “soft manes.” She has an affair with one; he says she’s “a worthless bastard.” She only has one school friend, a Scottish girl called Pet, who is warm and funny. When Marianne marries Hugo, Pet is studying sociology at Essex University. Pet’s feminist political awakening, a “life with purpose,” provides a powerful contrast to Marianne’s directionless, confined domesticity.

More than ten years later, staring at Parisian dolls, Marianne has truly become a sick parrot. She has survived a devastating personal experience and is, she realizes, “in the process of turning into my mother”: not ideal because Lavender is cold and remote, deliberately loses at Scrabble to protect the Colonel’s ego, and is unable to emotional involvement with her struggling only child. The Colonel is no better. With a red nose and drinking cognac, he cheerfully calls Marianne’s first love ‘some malarkey’. In less capable hands the pair would be hideous caricatures, but Tremain, whose many accolades include a Booker Prize shortlist (Restoration, 1989) and a Women’s Prize win (The Road Home, 2008), is far too subtle for that. She paints a moving and unbiased portrait of their old-fashioned Englishness; their mutual dependence and willful blindness to economic reality; and their ignorant parenting. Towards the end, as one lies in a hospital bed, the unfettered pain of the other is incredibly moving.

Absolutely & Forever is a compelling character study. Marianne is furious, insecure, and immature, but also honest, sweet, and lost. Gradually her eccentricity evolves into something more interesting, complex, and perhaps creatively important. There is a deceptive simplicity to all this. On one level, the novel is a mild and straightforward period drama about self-realization. But it is also an exploration of tolerance and kindness, and as such is more relevant to today’s readers than it might seem at first glance. It’s possible to escape a grim parrot cage, Tremain says, without harming or cursing those who put you there. None of this is earth-shattering, but at its best the novel is witty, thoughtful, and human, offering delicate and thoughtful pleasures.