Conrad & Eleanor by Jane Rogers review – two perspectives on a dying marriage

This powerful novel ruthlessly exposes its characters’ inner lives to explore the contradictions at the heart of love

‘Why oh why didn’t she leave him while the going was good?” Eleanor has sometimes wondered. But when Conrad, her husband of 30 years, fails to return from a conference in Munich, Eleanor is confounded. In this powerful novel, her ninth, Jane Rogers, best known for Mr Wroe’s Virgins and her Arthur C Clarke-award winning The Testament of Jessie Lamb, anatomises the contradictions of her characters’ inner lives. Eleanor is a high-flying workaholic scientist, autonomous (except when she isn’t) and unmaternal (except when she is). Perhaps Conrad will never come home and Eleanor will be blamelessly free of a decaying marriage? But then again, what if he has found another lover – just as she has? It’s an unbearable thought.

Rogers has never been afraid to expose the dark underside of people’s psyches, their shoddy motives and secret compulsions. Conrad & Eleanor takes a scalpel to the duality of its characters. Theirs is an old marriage on a modern pattern: child-loving Conrad, also a scientist, has been content to stay at home when necessary and nurture their four children, freeing Eleanor to pursue her ambitions. The novel is fascinated by “the slow accretion of tiny details of speech and action like specks of dust which gradually bury the partners in a marriage and make movement, change, impossible”.

Continue reading...