"This is a novel huge in scope, with the action moving over decades and continents, but it is also a deeply personal, private story."
I admit: I was in a rush in a bookshop and I picked up Love Forms by Claire Adam because its beautiful cover reminded me of Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers, one of my favourite books of the decade. The blurb, promising adopted babies, nuns and an older protagonist, suggested it might be up my street, so I bought it.
The novels aren’t at all alike, as it happens, except for a kind of unfussy honesty in their clear, uncluttered prose, a profound humanity, and a way of dramatising quiet lives, but Love Forms joins Small Pleasures as one of the best books I have read this decade. As soon as I finished reading, I was listing all the people I might lend it to, while at the same time wanting to keep it close, and then I thought, Aha! I owe Writers Review a review, so what could be better?
Love Forms is the second novel from Trinidad-born writer Claire Adam, whose first novel Golden Child (2019, now hurtling up my TBR pile) won massive acclaim and a slew of awards. It is the story of Dawn Bishop, a ‘rich, white’ girl from a respected Catholic family in Trinidad, who, as a pregnant teenager in 1980 is sent to neighbouring Venezuela on a small boat, to give birth to, and give up, her baby daughter in secrecy. We first meet Dawn on this adventure, where she is vulnerable, uncomprehending, and scared, before the action switches to present-day south London, where she is a woman in her fifties, attempting to make a meaningful post-divorce life while consumed by her lifelong need to find her lost daughter.
But it’s more complicated than that. Not only was the child given up, and the incident never spoken of again in Dawn’s otherwise loving and loquacious family, but her memories of her confinement in Venezuela are impressionistic. She has no idea where she was, or with what order of nuns; she has spent her adult life piecing together, not so much memories, as might-be memories, cutting out pictures of nuns, of the Venezuelan countryside, to compile some kind of record. She is cut off, not only from her daughter, but from her own past.
Dawn tells her story in a leisurely, non-linear way, with a lack of self-pity which makes it all the more moving. At the start of the book she has just made contact with a young Italian woman, who was born and adopted in Venezuela at the right time: she is the fourth possibility: is she the one?
I found the description of Dawn’s ‘Era of letters’ when, as a young, married woman, she wrote by hand ‘to all sorts of government departments and hospitals and churches around Venezuela’ heartbreaking. ‘Each of those feather-weight letters … cost something like 60p in those days. It doesn’t sound like much, but it added up’ expresses not only the cost of an international stamp but the accumulation of the numerous losses, missings-out and half-memories which make up the emptiness at the heart of Dawn’s life and the enormity of trying to fill in the blanks.
The internet comes along and makes the search easier but also more complicated, leaving Dawn vulnerable to scams and disappointments: ‘It was astonishing to us then: that people were able to reach across time and place to find each other again, where previously, connection had seemed impossible.’ One of the aspects of the novel I most liked, partly I suppose because Dawn is only a little older than I am, was how it sketches in the decades from 1980 to the present day.
I love novels which take me away from the familiar. Part of the joy of Love Forms is its juxtaposition of cold, grey England, where, as Dawn tries to explain, ‘It’s not easy’ with Trinidad and Tobago, where everything is brighter, the sea sparkling, the sky hot and blue, but where things are also not easy. Though the action is so interior, I learned something of the history and geography of a part of the world I know little about.
This is a novel huge in scope, with the action moving over decades and continents, but it is also a deeply personal, private story. The narrative voice is unsentimental, even matter-of-fact, as the narrator moves backwards and forwards over the decades, trying to make the reader understand. ‘I’ll be honest’, she says; ‘I’ve tried to draw what I remember’; ‘the point I want to make.’ But it is also beguiling, with a rich, smooth rhythm and flow that I suppose is Caribbean. I found myself slowing down, luxuriating in the prose, admiring the confidence of the storytelling, but always emotionally involved too.
A beautiful and deeply humane novel.
The novels aren’t at all alike, as it happens, except for a kind of unfussy honesty in their clear, uncluttered prose, a profound humanity, and a way of dramatising quiet lives, but Love Forms joins Small Pleasures as one of the best books I have read this decade. As soon as I finished reading, I was listing all the people I might lend it to, while at the same time wanting to keep it close, and then I thought, Aha! I owe Writers Review a review, so what could be better?
Love Forms is the second novel from Trinidad-born writer Claire Adam, whose first novel Golden Child (2019, now hurtling up my TBR pile) won massive acclaim and a slew of awards. It is the story of Dawn Bishop, a ‘rich, white’ girl from a respected Catholic family in Trinidad, who, as a pregnant teenager in 1980 is sent to neighbouring Venezuela on a small boat, to give birth to, and give up, her baby daughter in secrecy. We first meet Dawn on this adventure, where she is vulnerable, uncomprehending, and scared, before the action switches to present-day south London, where she is a woman in her fifties, attempting to make a meaningful post-divorce life while consumed by her lifelong need to find her lost daughter.
But it’s more complicated than that. Not only was the child given up, and the incident never spoken of again in Dawn’s otherwise loving and loquacious family, but her memories of her confinement in Venezuela are impressionistic. She has no idea where she was, or with what order of nuns; she has spent her adult life piecing together, not so much memories, as might-be memories, cutting out pictures of nuns, of the Venezuelan countryside, to compile some kind of record. She is cut off, not only from her daughter, but from her own past.
Dawn tells her story in a leisurely, non-linear way, with a lack of self-pity which makes it all the more moving. At the start of the book she has just made contact with a young Italian woman, who was born and adopted in Venezuela at the right time: she is the fourth possibility: is she the one?
I found the description of Dawn’s ‘Era of letters’ when, as a young, married woman, she wrote by hand ‘to all sorts of government departments and hospitals and churches around Venezuela’ heartbreaking. ‘Each of those feather-weight letters … cost something like 60p in those days. It doesn’t sound like much, but it added up’ expresses not only the cost of an international stamp but the accumulation of the numerous losses, missings-out and half-memories which make up the emptiness at the heart of Dawn’s life and the enormity of trying to fill in the blanks.
The internet comes along and makes the search easier but also more complicated, leaving Dawn vulnerable to scams and disappointments: ‘It was astonishing to us then: that people were able to reach across time and place to find each other again, where previously, connection had seemed impossible.’ One of the aspects of the novel I most liked, partly I suppose because Dawn is only a little older than I am, was how it sketches in the decades from 1980 to the present day.
I love novels which take me away from the familiar. Part of the joy of Love Forms is its juxtaposition of cold, grey England, where, as Dawn tries to explain, ‘It’s not easy’ with Trinidad and Tobago, where everything is brighter, the sea sparkling, the sky hot and blue, but where things are also not easy. Though the action is so interior, I learned something of the history and geography of a part of the world I know little about.
This is a novel huge in scope, with the action moving over decades and continents, but it is also a deeply personal, private story. The narrative voice is unsentimental, even matter-of-fact, as the narrator moves backwards and forwards over the decades, trying to make the reader understand. ‘I’ll be honest’, she says; ‘I’ve tried to draw what I remember’; ‘the point I want to make.’ But it is also beguiling, with a rich, smooth rhythm and flow that I suppose is Caribbean. I found myself slowing down, luxuriating in the prose, admiring the confidence of the storytelling, but always emotionally involved too.
A beautiful and deeply humane novel.
Love Forms is published by Faber.
See also: Sheena's review of The Woman all Spies Fear by Amy Butler Greenfield
Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers is reviewed by Adèle Geras
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