When a woman writes about love, it’s romance. When a man does, it’s literature. That may be the case, but in his gripping new novel Craig Sherborne applies emotional intensity and seemingly effortless originality to a theme neither gender ever tires of.
Sherborne has already impressed the entire spectrum of Australian literature with two stunning novelistic memoirs, Hoi Polloi and Muck. Now he has written The Amateur Science of Love, a memoir-like novel about a brittle, mutually destructive relationship that travels an unpredictable path to a devastating crisis.
Twenty-one year-old Colin, green around the gills and emotionally isolated, flees the family farm in New Zealand to seek fame as an actor in London. In a grotty youth hostel he meets the tall and beautiful Tilda, an opinionated, highly strung artist who is older than him.
They fall passionately in love – ‘in sickness’ as Colin describes it – and return to Australia to set up house in a decrepit former bank in a small wheat town in rural Victoria. As Tilda paints full time in her studio Colin tentatively pursues a career as a journalist. Then Tilda discovers a cancerous lump in her breast, an event that necessitates urgent surgery and alters the dynamics of the relationship forever.
The novel form gives Sherborne free rein to explore aspects of character and relationship without sticking strictly to the facts, but The Amateur Science of Love owes much to memoir (fans of the two memoirs will find many similarities between their narrator and the voice and character of Colin).
The progress of the relationship isn’t a simple trajectory from functional to dysfunctional; there are peaks and troughs, truces and stand-offs, moments of profound intimacy, and crises. Some of the rough edges of reality are retained in a way that lends both rawness and occasional dissonance – shouldn’t life as portrayed in a novel be less untidy? – but this is dealt with by the device of making Colin’s account an actual memoir that he writes in secret. Eventually Colin falls out of love for good, and at this point the novel is at its most confronting and ruthlessly honest.
A master of voice and pacing
Sherborne is a master when it comes to both voice and pacing. Every paragraph of this book offers small poetic morsels of text that seem to provide intimate access not only to Colin’s state of mind but to his unique view of the world. Key moments are chosen carefully to advance the action, and then conveyed with a level of forensic detail that is both highly visual and emotionally riveting: ‘She star-jumped straight down and strode off and skipped some more, her plait swinging with flicky pendulum energy’. It's a combination of technical finetuning and conversational ease that marks Sherborne as a significant talent.
The result is a portrait of a poorly parented young man struggling to grow up within the confines of a stifling relationship. It’s often wryly funny as the older Colin looks back on a pompous, self-aggrandising younger self who adopts a version of manhood that hails from the past but is somehow suited to the timewarped ambience of Scintilla.
Tilda’s cancer both attacks her body and affects her mental state, and Colin’s reactions to the caring role that he must adopt in the aftermath are bald in their moments of revulsion: ‘The trick was to be involved in the task without betraying a sense of duty, without sighing or appearing bored or put upon’. But to characterise this novel as an expose of ‘the way men think’, as Helen Garner has done, is a mistake. This is not a treatise on evolutionary biology and the mercenary nature of the male gender. Rather, the challenging subject matter allows the author and his readers to explore the intricacies of human relationships in a painfully honest and open-ended way. Tilda and Colin both behave appallingly at different times, and the reader is free to interpret their behaviour as he or she will, and even take sides. (Ironically, the frankness of this book, and its honesty about the visceral and destructive effects of love, owes not a little to Garner’s groundbreaking first novel, Monkey Grip.)
I interpreted this novel as a story of growing up, advancing mental illness and a relationship that gradually devolves into the abusive. It’s distressing to witness the pathology that seems to engulf Tilda after her surgery, but that the novel signals has been there from the very beginning. Sherborne has said in an interview that Tilda stops developing as a person when she meets Colin; certainly she grows steadily more self-deluded, narcissistic and domineering in the hothouse small-town atmosphere and as a result of her illness. Yet what is also an intimate portrait of a complex and deeply troubled young woman never turns monstrous even when the physical ravages of illness supervene.
There is much going on in the book thematically. As well as offering powerful writing about the mutual obsession of early love (‘being in love is a kind of being famous. Famous on a small scale to just one person’), the novel explores the complex and ever-changing power dynamics that occur in long-term relationships; the excessive need for control that love can sometimes produce, which destroys what it most wants to preserve; the myth of mental illness creating great art; the psychology of illness; and the fallout when love leaves forever. It also provides a sombre expose of the ways in which the world leaves the domestic carer existentially as well as practically alone, and what this might mean for both parties when the marrow of the relationship has disappeared for good.
Throughout the unfolding drama, Sherborne fearlessly examines the place where emotions and thoughts meet bodily experience. In doing so he provides a shorthand of the self and its interactions with the world that is as idiosyncratic as it is mesmerising.
