Death of the Heart

From StarMag, 13th Feb 2005

Review by DAPHNE LEE

THE LANDSCAPE OF LOVE

By Sally Beauman

Publisher: Little Brown

(ISBN:0316729434)

WHEN I read a Sally Beauman novel I find myself feeling both caressed and harassed. Her narratives are hypnotic; her words – symbolic and evocative – are full of portent and significance. I am lulled by the beauty of her style and the glamour of her characters, yet haunted by the certainty that nothing is right in the worlds she describes.

Her books are rich, dark things. Her characters, especially the women, are beautiful, dangerous and misunderstood. An air of doom prevails; secrets and lies fester and pollute everyone and everything, while lust and love compete for dominance: both are equally destructive.

Will she ever write a book full of nondescript people leading blameless, boring lives? It’s hard to imagine. Her latest, The Landscape of Love, is just what one has come to expect from her. Set partly in a mouldering, haunted abbey in the Suffolk countryside, it could have been a romantic, picturesque tale a la I Capture the Castle. Why, given the right tone it could have taken a satirical turn and ended up a modern Northanger Abbey. But no, Landscape is just exactly what her fans want – firmly and woefully a Beauman exercise in hand-wringing tragedy.

As the title suggests, it is a love story – that is, an anatomy of the emotion as experienced by and seen through the eyes of the novel’s characters. Love’s terrain is rugged, unfriendly and unforgiving – typical Beauman-country, a battlefield on which her characters die a thousand deaths, disillusioned, desperate, frustrated and obsessed.

It ain’t pretty, but it’s compelling, and like all Beauman’s work, one loathes to stop reading. She teases you mercilessly, constantly hinting, implying and inferring, so that the suspense is unbearable. Unfortunately, disappointment is also inevitable. All the hoo-ha is, at least I find, about nothing – how could it not be when whatever revelations Beauman has in store have your energetically back-flipping imagination to live up to? (Of course, it may just be that I have a more gratuitously morbid and disgusting imagination than hers.)

It’s no different with Landscape. Nevertheless, what a page-turner it is – the feeling of anticipation, when you’re right in the middle of the story, is hard to beat. Beauman has been likened to Daphne du Maurier (her last novel was actually a re-telling of du Maurier’s Rebecca) and I agree that she comes very close to matching that writer’s broodingly elegant style. In addition, Beauman, like du Maurier, specialises in puzzling yet beguiling female characters and settings that exude a sense of both mystery and menace.

In Landscape, we are bewitched by the Mortland sisters. The youngest, Maisie, is only a girl when the story opens, but she is also the narrator – a sly, intensely observant one who sees ghosts. Her sisters, in their early 20s and late teens respectively, are the beautiful and scornful Julia and the wild, bookish Finn.

It is the summer of 1967 and the family are gathered at the ancestral home. Also present are the sisters’ childhood friend, Dan; his best friend, Nick; and Lucas, an aspiring artist who is in the process of painting the sisters. In the second part of the book, both Lucas and the painting are famous; Julia and Nick are unhappily married; and Dan is a drugged-out has-been, suddenly gripped by the urgent need to make sense of that last summer in Suffolk.

This second portion of the book, set in London and narrated by a bitter and desperate Dan, is harsher in tone than the first, reflecting both his state of mind as well as the dog-eat-dog social climate of late 1980s Britain. And yet, there’s something about Maisie’s gently pensive voice, and even Julia’s final, dispassionate words, that are more unsettling than Dan’s explicit and intentionally offensive account.

All three are, in fact, masters of concealment, deliberately leading the leader deeper and deeper into a story by dangling the truth like a carrot. Ultimately, however, one is left in the dark. I even re-read the book, hoping to benefit from hindsight, but the second time around only made me certain that Beauman intended to leave us guessing. With this book, about that treacherous land called love, she may have decided that hiding the truth might be the most honest course of action.

Books by Sally Beauman, Daphne du Maurier and others about love and how it can really, really suck:

S. Beauman:
Dark Angel
Rebecca's Tale

D. du Maurier:
Rebecca
My Cousin Rachel

Others:
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
Babel Tower by A. S. Byatt
Heartburn by Nora Ephron (at least this one is funny)
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
The Willow Cabin by Pamela Frankau