Jane Campbell made a splash with her first book, Cat Brushing, a collection of provocative stories about older women still very much in touch with the sensual side of life. It was published two years ago, when she was 80.
Her follow-up, a first novel called Interpretations of Love, is a decidedly less sumptuous book involving a long-buried family secret and moral conundrum that dates back to WWII. At its heart are several characters trying to come to terms with the holes in their lives.
Malcolm Miller’s life seems to have shriveled prematurely. In 1946, as a 20-year-old, he promised to mail a letter for his vivacious older sister. Sophy had written to Joseph Bradshaw — the young doctor with whom she spent a passionate night while sheltering from the Blitz — because she believes he might be the father of her four-year-old daughter, Agnes. Shortly after entrusting Malcolm with the letter, both Sophy and her kind husband Kurt, whom she had married soon after her “dramatic encounter” with Joe, die in a car accident. On her deathbed, Sophy asks her brother whether he’s delivered her letter. Wanting to reassure her, Malcolm lies and says yes. Agnes is raised by her emotionally distant grandparents, with occasional visits from “Uncle Mally.”
Some 50 years later, Malcolm, emeritus professor of Old Testament Studies at Oxford, still has the letter. ( I’ll leave the “why” for you to discover in reading.) In fact, he held onto it even when Joe, in an unlikely twist, had unwittingly become an important figure in Agnes’ life during a crisis in her marriage. Malcolm is consumed with remorse over his dereliction of duty, and hopes to settle the matter and ease his conscience before he dies.
Self-excoriating to a fault, Malcolm is a hard character to love. Part of the generation shaped by the strictures of war and tight social mores, he is a self-declared “crusty old bachelor with a dicky heart” who lives “in a sort of tepid slurry of dissatisfaction with myself and my life.”
Campbell, who studied at Oxford and worked as a group psychoanalyst for 40 years, weaves a dilly of a plot that brings her characters together for a wedding, a christening, and a funeral. Many of the guests at each event are related by marriage or love affairs. The narration alternates between stodgy Malcolm, troubled Agnes, and Joe, a psychotherapist who claims to be more of a scoundrel than we ever see. Along the way, there’s plenty of soul-searching, confessionals, and picking apart of the proceedings. The ramifications of Sophy’s letter are analyzed from multiple angles, teasing out Malcolm’s sad reasons for having withheld it. But because the narrators’ points of view are not distinct enough, the book feels repetitive.
At its best, Interpretations of Love recalls the work of 20th century British writer Mary Wesley. Beginning in her 70s, Wesley brilliantly channeled the social liberation catalyzed by the war years in lusty novels such as The Camomile Lawn and Not That Sort of Girl.
Interpretations of Love is a heavier, more constrained affair, weighted by loss, haunting memories, and a sense of missed opportunities. Gorgeous descriptions of Agnes’ rich ex-husband’s garden alternate with flat lines like “Agnes grew up to be as clever as anything and went off to university.”
One of the hazards of book reviewing is that you can’t help but trip over familiar plots. Just this past spring, Valerie Perrin’s Forgotten on Sunday, for example, involved a young French girl who lost both her parents in a car accident, was raised by her dour grandparents, and as an adult, finally learned the truth about what really happened.
Of course it’s what a writer does to make these classic stories their own that matters. In Interpretations of Love, Campbell brings her analytic background to bear on an extended exploration of ambiguity — in love, in questions about free will, and in the unfathomability of both past and future.
Towards the end of the novel, Agnes reminds herself — and readers – that “You will have to wait to see what the uncertain future brings…Accept the uncertainty. Do not yet try to resolve it. The dynamics of the provisional. The end is written into the beginning.” It’s quite a lead-in to the novel’s disturbing climax, which certainly commands our attention — and upends any sunnier views of this family’s future we might have been harboring.