Love Story?

I tried with Alex Miller's "Lovesong" again yesterday and decided to leave it at that. Perhaps the title promised too much, not to mention the introductory quotation from "The Song of Solomon" which seems, in the light of the lack of fervour I felt while reading, to be a ploy to lure the unsuspecting lover of love stories in. I was so puzzled by the whole experience that I actually looked up "love" in the dictionary to see if I could work out what I was missing. It did not help.

The praise with which the book has been greeted in "The Guardian" is mighty and, I think, not fully deserved. But then I was probably expecting an experience like those I had on first reading "Middlemarch", "Jane Eyre" or "The Devil in the Flesh".

Love in literature and film is a hard nut to crack. It so often becomes sentimental or banal. I think a fine exposition of true love, not simply romantic posturing, needs to be firmly rooted in the writer's lived experience for the reader to get fully engaged. Jean Rhys is probably one of the most honest writers on the subject and it's worth reading all her novels, not just "Wide Sargasso Sea".