The Tapestry of Love

In one of the most gracious moves ever made by an author, Rosy Thornton responded to my lackluster review of one of her earlier novels, Crossed Wires, by sending me an email in which she offered to send me her newer one, The Tapestry of Love.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that such an offer, followed by the receipt of the book directly from Cambridge (with a nice note), did predispose me to give the book every benefit of the doubt. So when I say I liked it, that will come as no surprise. But there's also a reason I would be predisposed to dislike it. Let me tell you a bit of a story.

Once there was a young mother who had reached a stumbling block in her academic career and was staying home with two preschoolers.  She had a friend who would pass on bags full of paperback romance novels brought to her by her mother.  Every couple of weeks, this friend would bring over a new bag of books.  The young mother didn't have to dress the preschoolers, (who were often nebulizer-sucking sick), get them in carseats, and take them to the library.  She didn't have to worry about when the books were due.  She could read for ten minutes, dog-ear the page rather than scrambling for a bookmark, and answer the next pressing preschooler need.  A fast reader, the young mother read almost all the books she was brought, passing over only the occasional title with a half-naked Scots warrior on the front.  At least a third of the paperback romances she read featured a divorced woman who moves to a new place, starts her own business--usually a restaurant, a bakery, or a catering service--makes good friends very quickly and easily from among her new neighbors and clients, and falls in love with a man who truly appreciates her talents.  The young mother got very tired of this formula.

Okay, fast forward to this same mother, years later, getting a novel in which a divorced woman moves to a new place (the Cevennes mountains, in France), starts her own business (sewing and upholstery--a change from the cooking, at least), makes good friends very quickly from among her neighbors and clients, and falls in love with a man who appreciates her talents so much he buys and frames something she sewed.  I think you're now aware of why I might be predisposed to dislike this novel.

But I didn't.  Putting both my predispositions aside, I enjoyed the writing style and got immersed in the story, pretty much from the point where the main character, Catherine, who has moved to the Cevennes, is talking on the phone to her daughter Lexie, in England, and Lexie says to her:
"I know what the trouble is....Completely understandable, you poor thing. All very scenic over there and everything but naturally you're missing me."
Since this is almost exactly what I think my own daughter would say to me in similar circumstances, I started identifying with Catherine.

In fact, Catherine is almost completely happy with her own company and her sewing.  Even though I'd personally rather do almost anything than be made to sew, the appeal of it for Catherine is clear to me:
"As she started to stitch....She saw it all clearly, translated into the colors of silk. It was funny how, even as a child, she had been able to visualise a picture or pattern as soon as she began to sew; she had only to begin and the image would emerge, a template for her to follow, like the outline that forms on closed lids after staring at something too long."

It's amusing to watch Catherine adapt to rural life, especially in terms of eating locally.  The first time she is offered a dish of fresh wild boar, she "stared at him; she had a horror of killing in the raw. She was no vegetarian, but she preferred her meat without its claws."  The dish is delicious, of course, and she asks for the recipe.  Later, when she smells lamb cooking after a day spent helping herd a neighbor's sheep to summer pastures, she asks "Is it traditional....Sheep farmers who've walked all day with their flock, keeping them safely on the path, then when they stop for the night, dining enjoyably on a nice piece of mutton. It's a little close to home, don't you think?  The matter-of-fact answering question, from the local man she fancies, is "What better than food that transports itself?"

I love the part where Catherine's neighbor Madame Bouschet tells her a story about how hard her husband Augustin has always worked, even on vacation, because it sounds like what my friends always say about our sand castle projects at the beach:
"You should have seen him...with his trousers rolled up to the knee, digging holes in the sand. Jean-Marc wanted him to dig a hole as deep as the well at home, and he was at it a whole morning. I said to him, when the children were in bed, I said, it's typical of you. Supposed to be on holiday, and here you are, digging like it's time to lift the potatoes."

There is sadness in this story but it too is well-described. I particularly like the simile Catherine uses to describe how she felt when her mother died after spending years in a nursing home:
"I don't mean it was a surprise, because it wasn't. I didn't feel surprised, in my mind. What caught me unawares wasn't the fact of her dying, but the force of it. The physical impact, if that makes any sense.
Like standing ankle deep in the surf and knowing full well a cold wave is going to hit you, but the knowledge doesn't lessen the brunt of its strike."

And finally, you can't beat this novel for a happy ending. The local man turns out to have been wildly in love with her all along, and he finally has the sense to say it to her:
"When you ate my wild boar with such delicious reluctance. I fell at once. I have been quite enslaved."
If you're going to use a romance novel plot, you might as well do the romance part right. But there are other good parts to this novel, and I enjoyed them all.  It's like one of the wonderful French casseroles it describes, full of unexpected ingredients that end up better in combination than I could ever have hoped.

So who will like this book? Women, particularly women over 30. Anyone who wants a good story with lots of descriptions of French food in it--I got some of the same pleasure from reading The Tapestry of Love that I always get from rereading Peter Mayle's books about Provence.  Anyone who loves France and is curious about what life is like in the donkey-trodden Parc National des Cevennes.

Crossed Wires

Last week I read what struck me as a mildly entertaining romance novel, Crossed Wires by Rosy Thornton. It's fairly recent, published in 2008, but it reads like something out of the 1970s, with a character getting indignant about racism and the person being discriminated against keeping a stiff upper lip about it.

Part of the interest of the novel, for me at least, is that it's very, very British, and an American reader is left to imagine what kind of prejudices the male protagonist, a professor at Cambridge, has about the people in Sheffield, where the female protagonist lives, and vice-versa. When the female protagonist, Mina, thinks about the male protagonist, Peter, she "didn't suppose [he] had to spend his coffee breaks listening to people wittering about shoes. Although she found it hard to imagine what people in universities did talk about...."

The author, quite obviously of the professorial class herself, is at her best when describing the hysterics of a graduate student who has just handed in her thesis and is now discovering mistakes that she hadn't seen before. The scene reminded me vividly of a conversation I had years ago in a shared graduate student office with an older woman who told me that I had just veered over the line to what she described as "baroque worry."

Peter has a friend named Jeremy who livens things up every time the author allows him to make an appearance. As soon as he's introduced we learn that he has a partner named Martin and that "'Partner' was Jeremy's own word; when in company, he liked to follow it with the explanatory gloss 'partners in crime' and a lascivious leer." Peter suspects him of selecting packages of cookies "especially with innuendo in mind" on at least one occasion, when he is offered a "Viennese chocolate sandwich."

The novel ends predictably, with even the children of the couple falling immediately in love with each other. I feel a bit churlish about my lukewarm reaction, since The Zen Leaf and Moored at Sea had such nice things to say about it.