This is a slim book about first love, and Rose Tremain is at her absolute pitch-perfect best. Oh! That aching yearning of waiting for a boy and the need to know everything about him and be with him all the time. Marianne, at fifteen, has fallen in love with Simon. Her mother says: ‘Nobody falls in love at your age, Marianne. What they get are “crushes” on people’. But her mother could not be more wrong. I can’t think of any better description of love than Marianne’s: the narcissism and obsession, the fear and frenzy of it. She’s fizzing with love.
This is a very English story, set in the houses of ‘good families’ in the home counties, wandering up to London and Kings Road in the 1960s where the girls in their minis and boots walk with silky haired men and the young reinvent the world in a bonfire of first generational sexual freedom. Simon has gone to Paris, and Marianne never gets over him. Absolutely and Forever is a good title and maybe that is Tremain’s definition of real love. Even after years estranged, when Marianne and Simon meet again she’s remembering the night she lost her virginity ‘in a Morris parked in a sighing wood’.
She marries a decent man. It’s a different kind of love. She carries them both with her in that part of her mind where love affairs live, though her husband will never have the power of Simon. In the end we learn the twist of Simon’s absolutely and forever and dive into the complications of betrayal and truth and consequences of love. The book is only 180 pages, but they’re all damn good.
Marianne, telling the story, is a lovely character. I feel many of my best English friends have a touch of Marianne about them: feisty and gentle, sweet and cruel, fiercely intelligent but also hopelessly naive. Boundlessly generous in their affections. I love them all.
Absolutely and Forever is gorgeous. Buy it for your girl friends.
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