I hate Valentine's Day. I think there are about three years in your life when it's wonderful, and the other eighty-seven are varying kinds of horrid. But it's hard to avoid all the theme-ery that goes on everywhere else, and it's got me thinking about romantic love in fiction. I'd be willing to bet that it powers more novels than any other human emotion. Even LeCarré is always, fundamentally, about love betrayed. But as in so many other novels/movies/songs the actual substance of the emotion is taken for granted: the story is about what love (or lack of it) makes the characters do. For example, I loved Rose Tremain's Music and Silence for a hundred reasons: the extraordinary characters, the wonderfully authentic-seeming setting and voice, her sensitivity to human relationships. The only thing lacking was that the nature of the central love between two nice young people, touching though it was, was in a sense a given. That's what boys and girls do, after all. But as anyone knows who's fallen head-over-heels in love in a situation where they can't just go with the flow, and when they must and can try to understand what that love's made up of, it isn't as simple as that.
On forums and blogs over the last couple of days I've been intrigued to watch Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night surfacing again and again, among much more exalted novels, as one of the thinking woman writer's favourite love stories. It's one of mine, too, and and I think it's because the analytical intelligence and ear for emotional nuance that Sayers uses in plotting her detective stories is here also applied to love: Harriet's resistance to Peter and its gradual eroding is explored step-by-step, until not only do we feel the ending is earned, but we actually know what their love is made up of, what it's built from: not only can we see the house, but we can feel the weight and balance of the structure, and touch the very roughness of the bricks.
It's the appeal, too, of the Beatrice-and-Benedict merry war kind of love story. At its best (as seen in Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy or, more exaltedly, Pride and Prejudice) the couple have to fight their way towards an understanding. It's in working out why a car engine or a computer program won't do what you want, that you learn most about it, and in the same way we learn most about those two people and how they fit together as they struggle towards and against that fit. Which isn't to say that no other kind of falling-in-love will do, only that it, too, needs something to show us how it works. Am I the only reader to find that the real emotional strength of Love in the Time of Cholera wasn't in the long-thwarted teenage passion's final consummation, but in the portrait of a marriage, with all its hesitations and reticences and enduring, un-ideal love?
I could go on to describe how the love stories operate in The Mathematics of Love, but I won't, except to say that my original idea for it was two stories where the form and structure of the love that builds in each one are clearly opposites. Unlike many of the ideas which I start a novel with, this one endured.
