Alice is losing her father. In their family home in North London, Malcolm is succumbing to the lung cancer that he has hidden from his daughter while she travels abroad. Recalled to London by her sisters, Alice arrives just in time to see Malcolm before he dies.
Daniel is losing himself. Homeless and becoming ill, he wanders London searching for his lost daughter and leaving beautiful messages for her in the urban landscape. Daniel sees letters as colours, and creates collages of detritus in which words are spelled by these colours.
Sarah Butler's moving novel follows Alice and Daniel's journeys as they learn about themselves and their feelings. It's beautifully crafted: colour is central to the novel, and the descriptions of Daniel's collages are a pleasure to read. The novel is also in some ways a love letter to London: in a touching sequence towards the end of the novel, Alice and Daniel walk through London together. Butler describes this walk with a poet's eye and a Londoner's love for the hidden corners of the capital.
Lists can sometimes be the sign of lazy writing; however, in this novel Butler uses them very effectively as a structural device. Each chapter alternates between Alice's and Daniel's viewpoint and opens with a list of what the character has learnt or felt since the previous chapter. The lists are compelling in their succintness; they are a really simple but original way of developing the characters for the readers.
One word of warning: this novel is truly moving and at times almost unbearably poignant. The writing is so vivid and the emotions of the characters so well observed that I found I couldn't race through it. Instead I found myself reading it piece by piece, letting the writing sink in before I was ready to move on.
All in all, I was surprised and touched by Ten Things I've Learnt About Love. An unusually finely-written novel which deserves to be a huge success.
I must thank Pan Macmillan, who kindly provided me with a copy of this novel at their women's fiction party.
Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.6
No comments:
Post a Comment