"How to capture and lock away this feeling? She would write it as fiction and experience it afresh. Luckily for her readers, this is what Rose Tremain has been doing ever since."
Fifteen-year-old Marianne falls for eighteen-year-old Simon with his dark flop of hair, with the kind of love that Simone de Beauvoir says `takes up all thoughts, all instants, it is obsessive, tyrannical.’ Certainly it dominates Marianne’s life `absolutely & forever.’
I have read many moving, lyrical and beautiful novels by Rose Tremain and loved them all, especially The Road Home, Music and Silence, Sacred Country, The Colour, and Merivel (which has possibly the filthiest scene I’ve read in any novel.) She writes about different times, settings and characters, usually at a good length. This is where Absolutely & Forever is different. It is short. On holiday, how would I cope, without one of her beautifully written worlds waiting for me for more than one day?
Well, Absolutely & Forever is a mesmerising coming-of-age story that stayed in my thoughts for the remainder of the stay, and beyond. It is set among the upper-middle classes `when England was still known as England and not as the You Kay.’ Disgrace afflicts families who fear losing their apparent status. Marianne sounds isolated, with little connection with Mummy (Lavender) or Daddy. Daddy’s face quite puce and stupid-looking from the gin and Mummy complaining that the lumpy grass hurt her ankles. Her boarding school was no retreat. Each morning a thermometer, tasting of disgusting Dettol, was shoved into your mouth by one of the three matrons. The girls sniff yesterday’s knickers before putting them on. Her friend says that parents hate their children because they know that they’re the past and we’re the future.
Marianne’s self-esteem is low, yet her narrative voice is ironic and witty. I had much sympathy for her and enjoyed the spot-on timely settings, of the King’s Road, brimful of creatures in tiny little slanty boxes for skirts and lone guys like gazelles in velvet trews and snakeskin boots. Marianne never quite fits in, despite eating a lot of spaghetti Milanese, getting fat and acne-ridden, drinking red wine and sleeping with well-known photographer Julius Templeman, who humiliates her, saying, `I never told you before, Marianne, but you are actually a lousy fuck.’
Her focussed friend Pet, too blunt and Scottish for Marianne’s parents, is at the brand-new University of Essex in a high grey tower, taking a course which is a `Study of Everything.’ I enjoyed these scenes, especially as I studied at the new University of Warwick a while later. Does this count as historical fiction?
There are excellent characters, such as freckled orange-haired Hugo Forster-Pellisier, his parents Jocelyn and Felicity, as I remembered I had to call them, in their Station Wagon. Hugo is funny and kind and Marianne likes his comforting todger, but she still dreams of Simon. She sees the future as `a life of boredom and shame.’
We read vivid accounts of Paris, a department store in Newbury, a wedding, working as an agony aunt on a magazine, horses, and the beginnings of a writer’s life. No more from me now, except to say that secrets affect the story in a big way. Perhaps nowadays these secrets would be less kept, not hidden, especially between the generations.
Let’s hope so.
Marianne does come to realise, however, that she loves the English countryside with oak trees and hedgerows and narrow English lanes threading towards hills and tumps.
Absolutely & Forever is both amusing and piercing as Marianne tries to find herself in spite of everything, with little encouragement from those around her. "Daddy’s glittery eye blinked and his head jerked upward and he said, Nobody should put their hopes in stories, Mops." It’s not all gloom. When Marianne pauses in reading her story to her mother, Mummy was staring at me. `Go on,’ she said.
Some years before this novel, Rose Tremain published a memoir Rosie – Scenes from a vanished life. It is dedicated to `Nan’ (who showed Rose her how to love) and Rose’s beloved grandchildren. Rose writes of her mother, Jane had no schooling in love…This was the tragedy of her existence. We crept away to Nan’s comforting lair.
When she is ten, Rose loses her father, her home and welcoming school to a cold boarding school in Hertfordshire. Like Marianne, she feels stifled and yet finds her way out. She longs to be destined to be something, and fortunately has a memorable moment, a summertime epiphany when she was thirteen or fourteen, a profound feeling of wonder, a fleeting sense of the marvellous, which in its intensity, was almost a visionary experience. It slips away, leaving desolation. How to capture and lock away this feeling?
She would write it as fiction and experience it afresh.
Luckily for her readers, this is what Rose Tremain has been doing ever since.
Absolutely & Forever is published by Vintage.
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