This is a relatively short book, but despite that it does pack quite the punch! I had to read late into the night to finish this book as I needed to know what happened, and there was one or two shocks along the way that I just did not see coming. In fact I lay awake for the next couple of hours thinking over the book and was left with an overwhelming feeling of sadness for the main character. Not always that a book has quite as much an effect on me.

The premise of the book is quite simple, girl meets boy, they develop a relationship and she declares that she will absolutely and forever love him. However life doesn’t quite happen the way they, or at least she, perceived it would and the book tells her story.

I found this book to be totally engaging throughout, and have had to give it a day or two before I could give it a final rating. The characters are so well-written and you end up caring significantly for the main character. Her parents are shall we say ‘interesting’ and I liked the way they were written back into the story towards the end, and the impact this had on Marianne. This whole book centres around the theme of relationships and how important the right relationships are to us.

Having thought on it I strongly recommend this book but can see why one or two people wouldn’t enjoy the book. I have yet to have read a book by Rose Tremain I haven’t enjoyed, but this book has made me want to get to more of her other books I haven’t read.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. ( )

I read two articles this week that impacted on how I thought about the latest book from Rose Tremain.

The first was a call from Salman Rushdie to allow writers to create characters outside of their own experience. You can read it here: suffice to say that I agree with him. You cannot write (or read) about the complexities of life in a world full of diversity if these barriers are imposed on authors. My only caveat is that readers and writers should, IMO, read as widely as possible from a diversity of authors too.

The second article was from 2022: John Banville asserting in an interview that there has been a creeping retreat into infantilism. You can read it here but essentially he is concerned about two things: one is that readers don't seem to want difficult books now.

A friend said to me: “You see supposedly grownup people on the train unashamedly reading Harry Potter books; they should be reading grownup books, not children’s books!”

He makes the point that the escapism that children enjoy is one thing, but that the escape you get from art isn’t away from the world but into an infinitely wider one – into life.

Banville also says that his generation tried to address the question of being:

Fiction writers in Ireland now seem just to be writing about their immediate lives and the lives of their friends. That wasn’t the point at all for my generation; we were interested in what people are, not what they do.

What has any of this got to do with Rose Tremain's latest novella? It's the story of Marianne Clifford reflecting as the years pass on the way she nurtures her obsession with her first (failed) love. It's gently nostalgic, and it's (just bearably) narcissistic. It's set in 1960s upper middle-class Chelsea, where the Windrush generation is nowhere in sight and if gays are in the closet nobody opens the doors. The characters have names like Simon and Hugo; Rowena, Cordelia and Petronella a.k.a. Pet. They have horses called Mirabelle and Marvin.

Now, I like Rose Tremain's novels. I like her interest in exploitation (The Road Home, 2007); moral dilemmas (The Gustav Sonata, 2016); intolerance (Islands of Mercy, 2020); vengeance (Lily, a Tale of Revenge, 2021); and inequity (Merivel, a Man of His Time, 2012).

But while Absolutely and Forever is a mildly interesting story that takes us back to our younger selves — that first mad passion, that first broken heart — it's still a disappointment. Salman Rushdie's cautionary words about limiting the palette only to what the author knows, and John Banville's disdain for infantilism seem only too apt to me.

I had some hope for the novel on pages 46-7, when Marianne recounts an episode at school...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/10/26/absolutely-and-forever-2023-by-rose-tremain/ ( )