Communicating or acquiring information, be it governmental, recreational or general is more hit and miss than is ideal. There’s no single – or even several – channels we all share. Staying up to date on local goings on isn’t easy. Here are bath cubes, and Basildon Bond notepaper, and sauces made from marmalade to go with baked ham whenever I see a Renault 4 in the future, I’ll always think of Pet, who tells Marianne that hers looks like “a surgical boot”.Let’s be real. And while the young Marianne lives in semi-rural Berkshire, and likes horses more than most human beings – the novel’s horsey sections will perhaps seem peculiar to readers who didn’t grow up on Anna Sewell or Monica Dickens – its author’s careful delineation of her parents’ brittle, golf-club ways recalls Julian Barnes’s suburban-set Metroland. Its themes of adolescence and betrayal, high style and evocation of period, remind me of Françoise Sagan’s equally slim Bonjour Tristesse, though its particular Englishness also sets it apart from that book. Somehow, Tremain has imbued her 16th novel with the freshness – and the intense bitter-sweetness – of a first book of the very best kind. But each page breathes a kind of magic, a sigh of enchantment that’s hard to capture in a short review. This is a slender book some will think it slight. He calls her Yeti, and she calls him Anthracite, nicknames that date from a childhood holiday in Cornwall, when they played ping pong while wearing two old fur coats – and yes, there would be every possibility of happiness for them were it not for Marianne’s ongoing ache for Hurst, AKA the Paragon. Her life now off course, she enrols at a crummy secretarial college in London, hanging out in the Kings Road as it starts to swing gets a first job in a smart department store, and a second as an assistant to a Fleet Street agony aunt and then, at last, marries Hugo Forster-Pellisier, family friend and trainee auctioneer. For all that Marianne shares her name with the Dashwood sister who embodies the sensibility of the title of Jane Austen’s beloved novel, she’s a marvellously original creation: witty and much more clever than she thinks, but also, in a good way, quite batty. What follows is a coming-of-age story: funny, piercing and singular. Here are bath cubes, and Basildon Bond notepaper, and sauces made from marmalade to go with baked ham Trapped in her “love asylum”, with only her fiery friend, Pet, to talk any sense into her, she’s about to flunk a few exams of her own. But is this a tale of true love or agonising abandonment? When Simon, having flunked his Oxford entrance exam, disappears to Paris, we begin to suspect that things may not, after all, work out between them – though Marianne lives in hope, every day at her dreary boarding school dominated now by her longing to see Simon’s “titchy” writing on a letter, his characters “like angels trying to stand on the head of a pin”. On such dreams young lives are built or ruined – or they are at the back end of the 1950s, when Rose Tremain’s Absolutely & Forever opens. “Soon enough, I’m going to marry Simon and travel the world with him and eat dates in Arabia and snorkel among exotic fish along the Great Barrier Reef.”
“My days as a girl in this house are numbered,” she thinks. Arriving home after the big moment, she hardly cares if her parents, busy playing Scrabble at a baize-covered card table, notice the stains on her taffeta dress. The sudden daring in this case, you see, is only for the noblest of causes, for she’s passionately in love with the car’s owner, a floppy-haired god called Simon Hurst who’s going to Oxford and hopes to be a writer. When the novel she narrates begins, 15-year-old Marianne Clifford is as sweet and as innocent as they come, even if she is about to lose her virginity in the back of a Morris Minor.
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