Absolutely and Forever" by Rose Tremain

 

I read this delightful book in two sittings on a single day.

Marianne, 15, falls utterly in love with Simon, 18, losing her virginity in his Morris Minor. But when he fails his Oxford entrance he goes off to Paris leaving Marianne to repair a broken heart, a process which begins in the King's Road of Swinging London. Can she find love again and forget Simon? Or will she win him back?

It's a simple and delightful story with so much verisimilitude that it seems like biography. The characters, even those who are on first sight caricatures, have their complex depths revealed with understanding and sympathy. Some of the descriptions (see the quotes below) are beautifully original jewels, managing to capture pages of meaning in a single sentence.

A tender portrayal of enduring love and the damage that it can do. And if you like horses, good or bad, there are horses throughout, including a very metaphorical story at the end.

Selected quotes:

• "I forced myself to picture ... scruffy young Will Shakespeare getting hammered on sack in a riverside tavern and falling into the Avon." (I)
• "I'll tell you what I mean. Your mother and I have decided we are going to have to take very serious steps if you don't knuckle down. I could not be more clear about this. I hope you understand me." (I)
• "Merlin the stallion always won the race against Mirabelle because that's what male people and animals do: they always win." (I) I'm not sure that this is born out by the lives of the men around Marianne.
• "Their faces were mainly very pale and thin, with eyes rimmed with kohl. They wore tiny little slanty boxes for skirts and ... soft white leather boots. In these shining boots, they tripped along, with their candy-pink lips open and smiling, admiring their own reflections in the windows of the new shops, from which surged the kind of music that nobody had ever heard before." (II)
• "The guys sauntering up and down the King's Road were sometimes with the girls but more often on their own, like lone gazelles." (II)
• "I ... stared at the skin of my face, which ... had broken out into spots and now looked like some kind of lumpy grey soup insufficiently blended in Mummy's Kenwood mixer." (II)
• "I began wishing that phone boxes weren't phone boxes at all but convenient little euthanasia booths where you pressed button A and a lovely lethal gas scented with privet flowers overcame you, and that was that." (II)
• "Julius had parked a little black 2CV with one of its rear wheels up on the kerb. In this attitude, the car reminded me of a dog, lifting its leg to piss." (II) Somehow this says all you need to know about Julius.
• "In my life with Hugo, I felt, all the time, that I was doing the best I could, but now I knew for sure that mt 'best' resembled the antics of a stricken kind of creature, like a sick grey parrot in a cage." (IV)
• "Pity for him began to grow inside me; a little potato sprout of pity I'd never felt for him before." (V)

February 2025; 181 pages

First published by Chatto & Windus in 2023

My Vintage paperback edition was issued in 2024.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God