‘Only connect,” EM Forster wrote, but the world’s shortest epigraph often turns out to be an impossibly tall order. In Rose Tremain’s new novel, sincere connections between people are constantly being thwarted by old psychic injuries, blinding passions, misplaced love, envy, ambition and ethnic hatred. Her own choice of epigraph, from Montaigne, implies that friendship may be the most reliable form of connection, but by the end of the book, it feels as though there are some things that even friendship can’t fix.
At the heart of the novel is Gustav Perle, whom we first meet as a five-year-old boy, growing up with his widowed mother in a small town in central Switzerland just after the second world war. Gustav is a kind of Swiss William Stoner, the hero of John Williams’s rediscovered 1960s classic. His quietly damaged life will be dramatised for us in three acts.
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