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39 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exceptional., 13 Jul 2006
Written as her submission for her MPhil in writing at the University of Glamorgan, The Mathematics of Love is Emma Darwin's first novel. And what a first novel it is.
The novel weaves together two lives: Stephen Fairhust, a Major returned from the brutality of Wellington's Peninsular War to a world he tries desperately to be once more a part of; and Anna Ware, a fifteen year old girl all but abandonded by her feckless mother, forced to live with her uncle and drunken grandmother in a delapidated ex-school. Through the medium of letters (and in this respect there are resonances with both 'Cloud Atlas' and 'Possession' here) a link develops between the two, and parallels form between two lives more than 150 years apart. Loves develop, often against society's expectation, and ghosts of past and future seem to cross boundaries. There are thematic parallels too: the ghastly form of Belle, who brutally lords it over Kersey, seems like a modern day Napoleon, whose invastions of the peninsula and consequent battles with Wellingtons men form the sickening vignettes spaced throughout the novel. Anna's interest in photography parallels with Lucy Durward's desire to render much that she sees through the medium of her sketch pad. A young boy appears, as if from nowhere, seeming to jump across time. Again and again we are made to think about the nature of time and how a good novellist can play with it.
But it is in the quality of the prose that the novel really sparkles. There are many novels written whose ideas are original and whose narratives have been meticulously planned. There are few which some close to the sharpness and clarity of Darwin's writing. Every word counts. There are passages of description which deserve rereading: Tom Greenshaw's bruises after being beaten are described as being 'dark as ink, spilt to make a picture of the boots and stones that had struck his soft flesh.' There are so many passages like this, ones that pull you up short, make you smile, give you shivers. In addition, the effortless switching between the formal, Austen-like prose (as good as, in my opinion) and the more informal prose of Anna Ware's world, makes for compelling reading. With very little other than a line break, Darwin is able to take us from one world to another. There are few novels which can do this so well. It took AS Byatt a long time to produce something similar, but Darwin has done it at her first attempt. David Mitchell at times seems forced in 'Cloud Atlas', but not so here. It works, brilliantly, and without a foot wrong.
Emma Darwin should be justly proud of this book. It is original, mature, intelligent and beautifully rendered. Like Lucy Durward (who I think might have something of the novel's author in her), Darwin is able to render a character and a scene with a few deft brush strokes, leaving us all the more illumuniated for it. An evocative and at times erotic novel, The Mathematics of Love deserves success, as its readers cannot fail but take something quite special from it.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Incredible insight into society and human nature of times past and present, 28 May 2007
The blurb of this book is misleading as the focus of this book isn't as it suggests the two love stories development and intertwinement but rather what society expects of us in different cultures and periods with the last two hundred years. The relationships explored in this book are beautiful in many different ways and Emma Darwin portrays realistic damaged characters with such integrity that a reader feels they are their best friend. The book is a very philosophical and fascinating look at what love really is and does not always present what the reader would want or expect. However, the book takes a long time to draw the reader in and long chapters swapping in first person between two main characters can be confusing at first and tiresome. I would thoroughly recommend this book but do not be mislead into believing you are going to get a wonderfully gothic romantic period novel. Also the book leaves several loose ends which I believe the author has encouraged the reader to make their own assumptions about but this can be annoying.
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"I like to think of you reading my small tales aloud this evening", 25 Jan 2007
Sex, love, and war echo throughout the generations as author Emma Darwin spins a unique and quite lovely tale that exposes the inner-most lives and unsupecting passions of two very different people who unwittingly collide beyond the realms of time at the ancient and gothic manor house of Kersey Hall, in rural Suffolk.
In The Mathematics of Love, war veteran Major Stephen Fairhurst and the dissolute teenager Anna Ware embody a sense of place that is unexpected and often quite astonishing as they inadvertently become the focal points in two very different versions of history.
In 1819, Stephen Fairhurst escapes to the relative peace of Kersey Hall where his nurses his war wounds after loosing a leg in the Battle of Waterloo. Unwittingly caught up in the Peterloo and Corn Law riots, he makes the acquaintance of Mrs. Greenshaw and her artist sister Lucy Durward when he rescues Lucy's nephew from certain death on the battlefield.
Rebuffed as a marriage suitor by Mrs. Greenshaw, Stephen travels to Brussels where he continues to correspond with Lucy who is eager to learn about Waterloo - especially about the regiments and the cavalry. As their friendship gradually unfolds, Stephen's candid correspondence steadily illuminates a lost Spanish love, a woman who goes by the name of Catalina, whom he abandoned in San Sebastian after the War.
As Stephen's spirits are weighed down with a wintry melancholy and the memory of Spain, and as he pours his heart out to Lucy about a time that was past, the young and dispirited Anna arrives at Kersey Hall. It is now 1976, and Anna has just been unceremoniously dumped at the manor house - now an obsolete boarding school - whilst her mother holidays in Costa del Sol with her latest boyfriend.
Placed in the care of her strange Uncle Ray, Anna also learns that her drunken and hideously cruel Grandmother is now staying, along with an almost feral and horribly abused boy called Cecil. Anna is left alone in a place where there is little solace and much despair. Lonely, she reaches out to the companionship of her neighbours, the artistic Eva and Theo. Both are accomplished photographers and both have a very modern view of sex, marriage and relationships.
Anna has a stubborn spirit and a generous heart, and as she awakens to the world of sex and art through her friendship with Theo, she also reaches through the world of the living into the dead when she acquires Stephen's letters. It is through his correspondence to Lucy all those years ago that Anna comes to recognize that Stephen's sadness "makes her own ache of sadness tighten."
Whilst Stephen becomes ever more reliant on Lucy to help purge the silent oppression of his memories, particularly those of Catalina, Anna finds herself becoming unavoidably linked to Kersey's past. Layering her novel with a type of duel narrative, Darwin threads her two stories together with the themes of art and photography - Lucy is the avid painter who inspires Stephen to finally reconnect with Catalina, whilst Theo is the accomplished photographer who motivates Anna to document her worldview and awaken to the world around her.
Moving effortlessly between the two time periods, Darwin writes with flashes of great insight and she's equally at home in describing the eloquent, and almost stullifyingly formal nineteenth century world of Stephen as she is at recounting the more liberal, arty and sexually progessive world of the seventies that Anna finds herself unwittingly thrust into.
Art obviously plays an important part in the novel, with the drawings of Lucy and the photos of Anna and Theo almost acting like a type of looking glass, placed where time is divided, so that the past is laid over the future, and the future is laid over the past.
The Mathematics of Love is a lovingly rendered book, deeply sensual in the contemporary passages, yet also quite austere in its depiction of 1800's propriety; it has all the restrained weaving of the elements - the horrors of war, the ache of first love, the untamed winds of passion, and the intrinsic complications that come with sexual fidelity.
The novel also features two startlingly real protagonists, who although they may be the rebound from the past, are also possibly on the cusp of something positive and quite profound in the future. Mike Leonard January 07.
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