Astute excavation of love’s broken artifacts

In the City of Love’s Sleep

Lavinia Greenlaw Faber and Faber

The third novel by the poet and memoirist Lavinia Greenlaw is an ambitious work, both refined and unsettling. Its heroine, Iris, a 46year-old museum conservator, is in the throes of separating from her faithless husband, David, and the two are fielding, roughly, the distress of their little girls.

The novel’s hero is Raif, a widower and academic who specialises in the history of science. Both Iris and Raif are wounded, uneasy and remote. Raif’s grief has rendered him numb, and his reaction to life events, “I don’t know what this means”, has become habitual, a resting place almost.

Raif is about to permit his girlfriend Helen to move into his flat, although he barely registers her existence. Meanwhile, Iris is busy wondering whether to reconcile with her husband. Mending and preservation are at the heart of her museum job, but does she really want to bring her work home?

David is unwell with the beginnings of multiple sclerosis, a state of affairs Iris finds infuriating. His lack of symptoms maddens her and makes him feel in the wrong. Yet his status as an invalid has rendered him very powerful. She is caught.

Under these fragile and inauspicious circumstances Iris and Raif meet. Something of great importance passes between them, without anything quite being done or said. In some profound way we are told they have uttered “yes” to each other and what follows is their long and fraught journey towards a shared life, via a catalogue of all the others they have loved, versions of themselves they have inhabited and evaded, things they have felt and failed to feel.

This journey is punctuated, framed and dominated by a strong narrative voice —a character in itself in the novel, although unnamed — which reads these characters of love as though they are a poem, interpreting actions and conversations as a literary critic or, more fittingly, as a museum curator might.

Greenlaw’s narrator is omniscient in the extreme, much more so than the George Eliot of Middlemarch, say, drawing on the past and the future with rhythms and leanings and preoccupations of his or her own, homing in on the action of the book from a height. The narrator also comments on the more general plights and gripes of people as they endeavour to survive big city life.

This strand of In the City of

Love’s Sleep contains startling and original insights about attraction, disappointment, loss and care, providing notes of high rigour among all the uncertainty and floundering. Yet I sometimes felt a sibling rivalry with the strong interpretative commentary, wanting to make up my own mind.

The novel also contains short chapters dedicated to exhibits in the museum where Iris works, shedding light on or undercutting the book’s delicate action. There is a particular poignancy attached to the items that languish out of sight in the museum’s stores.

The most affecting passages in the book, however, are the ones relating to the breakdown of relationships; the misunderstandings, stallings and missteps involved in the death of love. This is Greenlaw’s great subject, not new romance. Her endings are filled with high drama and cauterising turns of phrase. She excels at scenes centred on small domestic tragedies and the succession of last straws that can accumulate over time.

This is a novel in which people come to life in flashes when they switch themselves on, living a sort of half-existence at other times. Personality is something that requires performance, Sunday best even, for life to be fully entered into.

As I read, I found myself thinking of the term museumquality and what it might mean when applied to human beings. /©