Although just 180 pages long, Tremain packs into this work much that is universal to life: questions of identity, happiness, honesty and “becoming” (the person you want to be). It is touching and poignant, but wryly comic too, in a very British way. The words “absolutely and forever” are uttered at a few critical moments in the novel: they are chosen by the heroine, Marianne, to utter to her first love, to whom she believes she will be eternally committed, on losing her virginity, age 15. She is erroneous, and yet this longing persists throughout the novel. Tremain's genius — exhibited most starkly at the reveal — is not to offer readers the predictable. Marianne travels to Paris in the hope of seeing her initial beau, and likewise sees him at her mother's funeral, yet there is no reconciliation. Simon's mother tells Marianne that he had “absolutely and forever” nurtured a homosexual love for an Indian boy met at boarding school. This brief summary gives a sense of the emotional rollercoaster that the reader witnesses. That the action moves from the staid 1950s of rural upper middle England through to the Swinging Sixties of London provides further context. Tremain captures nuance and zeitgeist superbly. Marianne is a wonderful contradiction, but you can't help but admire her. Each page of Tremain's prose contains some wonderful descriptive gems too. 9/10.
By Rose Tremain