Rose Tremain is one of those authors whose name is completely familiar to me without much idea of her writing at all. Positive reviews in the blogosphere encouraged me to give her a try, and I thought her novella Absolutely & Forever (2023) would be a good place to start.

Narrated by Marianne Clifford, A&F details her abiding love for handsome and clever Simon Hurst. It is the late 1950s and Marianne is fifteen, awkward and unsure in everything except her feelings for Simon.

Tremain brilliantly captures the naivete and arrogance of youth.

“Well, we’ve arrived here, but my days as a girl in this house are numbered, because soon enough I’m going to marry Simon and travel the world with him and eat dates in Arabia and snorkel among exotic fish along the Great Barrier Reef.”

Marianne never pauses long enough to think about what she is going to do outside of her relationship with Simon, or whether he feels the same way. When Simon flunks his Oxford entrance exams and decides to move to Paris, his vanity and insecurity are so comical and heart-breaking:

“But I probably won’t see it through. I’ll just hang out in jazz clubs or try and meet Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and get drunk on existential nihilism.”

Bless.

Tremain treats this adolescent affair with humour and seriousness, demonstrating the ridiculousness of behaviour but never laughing at the feelings or the pain involved. I particularly liked this scene of Marianne impatiently returning from a family holiday knowing a letter from Simon will be waiting:

“As we drove across Salisbury plain, my vision of the letter somehow eclipsed my view of the standing monoliths of Stonehenge that waited patiently for me to see them for four thousand years (or perhaps longer, for all I knew about them then). From this, I have to conclude that love makes people indifferent to even the noblest feats of primitive engineering, but that they feel no real remorse about this.”

Poor Marianne feels she lets everyone down: her brittle mother; her stiff veteran father; her frustrated teachers; her bitchy friends. She and her true friend Petronella move to Swinging Sixties London:

“It seemed to me that everybody in that place had undergone a metamorphosis which made them appear entirely beautiful in a deranged kind of way.”

Where Marianne continues to flounder, unable to pass her secretarial exams or achieve her fantasy:

“I walked with the confidence of a girl who has formed a coherent idea of who she is and how her life will unfold. But this was really all my plan consisted of: a kind of hologram of me, heading towards some consoling destination of the mind, which, in actual fact, I was unable to name.”

Absolutely and Forever is a compassionate novel which had me wincing at scenes, feeling both frustrated by and sorry for young Marianne. Although she pines for Simon, she also seems to pine for a sense of self, or purpose, forever out of reach.

The novella conveys deep sadness with a deceptively light touch, demonstrating how people carry on while in the midst of heartbreak. There were scenes with Marianne’s elderly parents to towards the end which were devastating, yet not unusual. There is nothing in Absolutely and Forever which was extraordinary, which I think is exactly the point.