Book Review: Promise of Love
Jun. 26th, 2022 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerMary Renault's Promise of Love (Purposes of Love in the UK) is her first novel and POSSIBLY her most grindingly miserable, although I haven't read all of them for purposes of comparison.
The book kicks off with Vivian, a 26-year-old student nurse in a London hospital, surprised by an unexpected visit from her brother Jan, who lives light and unattached and can rarely be bothered with such trammels as "regular correspondence." (He is a couple of years older than Vivian but similar enough in appearance they are often mistaken for twins.) Jan takes Vivian to visit his friend Mic, who (it is subtly clear), is in love with Jan. Vivian ALSO reads as more or less in love with her brother, which I suppose is a nice change of pace from Renault's usual mother-son Oedipal overtones.
After Jan floats off again for his next job, Vivian and Mic of course fall in love with each other. Actually this part of the book is rather sweet. (The courtship parts of Mary Renault's books are often sweet; it's a pity the characters can't remain in perpetual courtship.) As it turns out, they have a lot more in common than just "being in love with Jan," and they bond over their shared loves of fencing, ballet, and falling outside of gender norms, although over the course of their relationship this proves a source of tension at least as much as alliance.
Vivian is, understandably, a little anxious about the fact that Mic was in love with her brother first: as he admits, the first time he kissed her it was because she looked so much like Jan in that moment. "Did you fall in love with me because my sibling turned you down and I'm the next best thing?" is a tough starting place for a relationship and honestly I would understand if Vivian were even more anxious about it than she is, but possibly the fact that she also thinks Jan is the bee's knees makes it easier to accept? (They actually spend very little time sighing over how Jan is the MOST amazing, possibly only because it's so obvious that they don't feel the need to spell it out to each other.)
Mic and Vivian are also both a little !!!! about the fact that Vivian is Mic's first real relationship with a woman: he's had one previous lover, a schoolmate while he was in school, and of course there's the aforementioned one-sided crush on Jan. Sometimes they joke about it, but underneath there's a real unease, which comes out particularly in one scene where Vivian dresses up in Mic's clothes (including a velvet tie he just happens to own - IIRC velvet ties were very Oxford aesthete) and Mic rips them off her and Vivian is like "He's going to be so upset about hurting me when he's calm again" and... well, anyway, clearly it's a sore spot.
By this time the honeymoon period (which lasted, I believe, two whole months) is beginning to wane. Then Vivian goes on night shift at the hospital, and the relationship collapses in slow motion under the combined weight of their insecurities, some of which to be honest were a little obscure to me. This is the part where the fact that this is Mary Renault's first novel shows the most strongly: she's trying to do the thing she does so well in many of her later books, where you understand many of the character motivations mostly by inference, but she hasn't quite mastered the art yet and there are times when it's just not clear what we're meant to be inferring.
(Honestly a LOT of what goes wrong is that Vivian is dog-tired from working night shift and if they had just been patient it might have worked itself out when she got back on day shift. No one is at their best when they have to be nocturnal for three months!)
Anyway, the relationship hits the skids. But Vivian discovers that Mic is showing signs of tuberculosis! She rushes to him to try to save him, realizes that she cannot, and decides - to write to Jan, begging him to come visit Mic! "I thought, perhaps, that if he were to see you again he might realize he was comparatively happy before he met me, and come in time to treat all this as irrelevance. It's an escape rather than a solution, but it's all that I can see..."
Jan is appalled. Generally speaking, the most grievous sin in Mary Renault is the refusal to Face Reality, and here Vivian is suggesting that Jan (beloved by both Vivian and Mic for his fantastic ability to fully face and enjoy the reality of any place he finds himself) should aid and abet Mic in escapism?
Frankly I think "remembering that there is a life outside your failed love affair and finding new sources of happiness" IS a solution to a failed love affair, and not sheer escapism, but generally I've discovered that when Mary Renault characters Face Reality they almost always come up with something that I consider completely barmy. (In The Friendly Young Ladies Leo, Facing Reality, concludes that the evil doctor Peter who pretends to be in love with his woman patients to cheer them up "is really a much better person than I am." NOT UNLESS YOU KICK PUPPIES FOR FUN, LEO.)
Jan, breaking the habit of a lifetime policy of non-attachment and non-interference in other people's affairs, goes to visit Vivian, then reluctantly goes to visit Mic, and then they go for a drive and Jan dies after breaking his back in a car accident.
I must say that as I was reading I shrieked at the melodrama of this. It occurs to me that in a way it's an externalization of the same bizarre narrative process that occurs with Leo at the end of The Friendly Young Ladies. Jan is Vivian's masculine double (always mistaken for her twin; free, unattached, impersonally interested in everything but not deeply emotional involved in it), just as Leo is part boy and part woman; and, like Leo's boyish side, Jan has to die so that Vivian can fully lose her personality to her flesh-and-blood male lover.
The night after Jan's death, Vivian goes to Mic, and they reconcile. (Like Laurie at the end of The Charioteer, Mic acts not out love, but compassion.) They are together again, and Vivian "knew, without joy or sorrow but in a motionless certainty, that he was the possessor of her self also."
"Henceforward their relationship was fixed, she the lover, he the beloved... In the secret battle which had underlain their love, of which she, only, had been aware with the mind, she was now and finally the loser. There were several ways in which she might partly have evaded the knowledge she brought to this moment..."
But Vivian does not avail herself of these evasions: she Faces Reality. And what a reality! My God. Who would buy love at the price?
The book kicks off with Vivian, a 26-year-old student nurse in a London hospital, surprised by an unexpected visit from her brother Jan, who lives light and unattached and can rarely be bothered with such trammels as "regular correspondence." (He is a couple of years older than Vivian but similar enough in appearance they are often mistaken for twins.) Jan takes Vivian to visit his friend Mic, who (it is subtly clear), is in love with Jan. Vivian ALSO reads as more or less in love with her brother, which I suppose is a nice change of pace from Renault's usual mother-son Oedipal overtones.
After Jan floats off again for his next job, Vivian and Mic of course fall in love with each other. Actually this part of the book is rather sweet. (The courtship parts of Mary Renault's books are often sweet; it's a pity the characters can't remain in perpetual courtship.) As it turns out, they have a lot more in common than just "being in love with Jan," and they bond over their shared loves of fencing, ballet, and falling outside of gender norms, although over the course of their relationship this proves a source of tension at least as much as alliance.
Vivian is, understandably, a little anxious about the fact that Mic was in love with her brother first: as he admits, the first time he kissed her it was because she looked so much like Jan in that moment. "Did you fall in love with me because my sibling turned you down and I'm the next best thing?" is a tough starting place for a relationship and honestly I would understand if Vivian were even more anxious about it than she is, but possibly the fact that she also thinks Jan is the bee's knees makes it easier to accept? (They actually spend very little time sighing over how Jan is the MOST amazing, possibly only because it's so obvious that they don't feel the need to spell it out to each other.)
Mic and Vivian are also both a little !!!! about the fact that Vivian is Mic's first real relationship with a woman: he's had one previous lover, a schoolmate while he was in school, and of course there's the aforementioned one-sided crush on Jan. Sometimes they joke about it, but underneath there's a real unease, which comes out particularly in one scene where Vivian dresses up in Mic's clothes (including a velvet tie he just happens to own - IIRC velvet ties were very Oxford aesthete) and Mic rips them off her and Vivian is like "He's going to be so upset about hurting me when he's calm again" and... well, anyway, clearly it's a sore spot.
By this time the honeymoon period (which lasted, I believe, two whole months) is beginning to wane. Then Vivian goes on night shift at the hospital, and the relationship collapses in slow motion under the combined weight of their insecurities, some of which to be honest were a little obscure to me. This is the part where the fact that this is Mary Renault's first novel shows the most strongly: she's trying to do the thing she does so well in many of her later books, where you understand many of the character motivations mostly by inference, but she hasn't quite mastered the art yet and there are times when it's just not clear what we're meant to be inferring.
(Honestly a LOT of what goes wrong is that Vivian is dog-tired from working night shift and if they had just been patient it might have worked itself out when she got back on day shift. No one is at their best when they have to be nocturnal for three months!)
Anyway, the relationship hits the skids. But Vivian discovers that Mic is showing signs of tuberculosis! She rushes to him to try to save him, realizes that she cannot, and decides - to write to Jan, begging him to come visit Mic! "I thought, perhaps, that if he were to see you again he might realize he was comparatively happy before he met me, and come in time to treat all this as irrelevance. It's an escape rather than a solution, but it's all that I can see..."
Jan is appalled. Generally speaking, the most grievous sin in Mary Renault is the refusal to Face Reality, and here Vivian is suggesting that Jan (beloved by both Vivian and Mic for his fantastic ability to fully face and enjoy the reality of any place he finds himself) should aid and abet Mic in escapism?
Frankly I think "remembering that there is a life outside your failed love affair and finding new sources of happiness" IS a solution to a failed love affair, and not sheer escapism, but generally I've discovered that when Mary Renault characters Face Reality they almost always come up with something that I consider completely barmy. (In The Friendly Young Ladies Leo, Facing Reality, concludes that the evil doctor Peter who pretends to be in love with his woman patients to cheer them up "is really a much better person than I am." NOT UNLESS YOU KICK PUPPIES FOR FUN, LEO.)
Jan, breaking the habit of a lifetime policy of non-attachment and non-interference in other people's affairs, goes to visit Vivian, then reluctantly goes to visit Mic, and then they go for a drive and Jan dies after breaking his back in a car accident.
I must say that as I was reading I shrieked at the melodrama of this. It occurs to me that in a way it's an externalization of the same bizarre narrative process that occurs with Leo at the end of The Friendly Young Ladies. Jan is Vivian's masculine double (always mistaken for her twin; free, unattached, impersonally interested in everything but not deeply emotional involved in it), just as Leo is part boy and part woman; and, like Leo's boyish side, Jan has to die so that Vivian can fully lose her personality to her flesh-and-blood male lover.
The night after Jan's death, Vivian goes to Mic, and they reconcile. (Like Laurie at the end of The Charioteer, Mic acts not out love, but compassion.) They are together again, and Vivian "knew, without joy or sorrow but in a motionless certainty, that he was the possessor of her self also."
"Henceforward their relationship was fixed, she the lover, he the beloved... In the secret battle which had underlain their love, of which she, only, had been aware with the mind, she was now and finally the loser. There were several ways in which she might partly have evaded the knowledge she brought to this moment..."
But Vivian does not avail herself of these evasions: she Faces Reality. And what a reality! My God. Who would buy love at the price?
