One damned thing after another
Stephen Abell
LOVE IS STRANGE by Joseph Connolly Faber, £12.99, pp. 495 ISBN 0571227082 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Love is Strange is, like love, strange. It is a sprawling account of a dysfunctional English family (the tightly wound Coyles) that unsettlingly moves us from the apparent tedium of Fifties suburbia through Sixties liberation in Swinging London to a present-day world of vice and kidnapping. A combination of monologue, dialogue and narrative alternately dulls and thrills the reader into a state of confused distraction. It can also claim to have created a new genre: kitchen-sink prose, in the sense both of the resolutely domestic subject matter and the fact that the author really has thrown everything into describing it.
The 1950s section is written predominantly in the form of overlapping, generally monotonous monologues from the four members of the family. There is submissive Gillian the ‘archetypal’ — blurb, of course, for stereotypical — housewife (‘I’ll quietly assure him that I’m really quite fine, right as rain, fit as a fiddle’), Annette the troubled teenager, schoolboy Clifford (‘Maths and Jog tonight. I really hate old man Meakins. He always gives us twice as much rotten prep as all the other masters’) and his grouchy father, Arthur. Their manifestly clichéd treatment provides an over-easy means for Connolly to establish the historical setting. What results (and the streams of thought are generally far too long, and this review — and life in general — too short, to quote fully) is a section of the book too concerned with its own historicity to be convincing or intriguing: ‘You’d have to be like someone out of a picture by that foreign so-called artist Picasso they’re all making such a song and dance about’, and so on.
However, if the author’s effortful attempts at authenticity — what might be termed his period pains — threaten initially to distract, he thankfully concentrates more on the thrust of the story as the novel progresses. Initial undercurrents of desire — Arthur going ‘all grunty’ with Annette; Annette ‘stroking Clifford’s tuppence’ and violent inclinations are made surprisingly explicit. Annette recalls, for example, her gruesome time at a punitive convent, in which she is whipped, raped by priests and then made to undergo an abortion:
It seemed to be all that my innards were for, then — to be gouged at, and cause me such pain. And here was just another whiskeysodden and dirty man, just one more — they put things in, and they take them away from you.
This is good shocking prose, action speaking louder than thoughts. But it only serves, in the end, to demonstrate the lack of control on the part of the author, as the relished realism drifts into a repetitious catalogue of unshocking violence. If the first section is tedious in its domesticity, the later pages become persistently and tamely exotic: there is incest, kidnapping, assassination, the suborning of Eastern European minors, a priest whose ‘eternal yearning was to be nailed to the cross’, even a ‘rising enthusiasm for being wrapped up snugly in a terry-towelling nappy, then being gently suckled’. This has an unintentional and disquieting comic effect, as do the tribulations of the young Miss Coyle, who by the end of the novel has been sexually involved with almost everyone (her father and brother, nuns and priests); indeed, without wishing to be cruel, it’s hard to recall a character who doesn’t end up, as it were, slipping through Annette.
And this is set against a background of desperately serious narrative musings that seek to deal with the major moral issues surrounding the novel’s emotional and physical attractions: the ‘dark stain, true sin’ and ‘true love’ of life. All of which make Love is Strange a frustrating, diverting, genre-bending read. Odd, really.
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