A promise TOO FAR?
FOLLOW KATE AND PAUL THROUGH THE YEARS AFTER THE TWO FRIENDS KEEP A VOW TO MARRY
Ipicked up this novel attracted by its basic plotline – two childhood friends decide if they don’t find love by the time they hit the age of 30, then they will marry each other. I was thinking it sounded fluffy and fun, but actually I got a little more than I bargained for.
The story is told in separate strands chronicling different periods in the lives of its two main characters, Kate and
Paul. My favourite era is their childhood in the 1980s, growing up in the English countryside where they form a firm friendship despite coming from very different backgrounds.
Poetic, working-class Paul and unhappy rich girl Kate are inseparable at that stage. But we also meet Kate in the late ’90s as an ambitious career woman working in advertising in London. And we spend time with her and Paul on the family holiday they take to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary – by which point, although they’ve kept their promise to marry, there is a growing distance between them.
So the story leaps about a bit, and we get to know the characters in a disjointed way that could, in the hands of a less skilled writer, be confusing but here seems to make them more multi-layered and real.
There is nothing momentous about Kate and Paul’s story, but it is very authentic in the way it details the waxing and waning of a friendship, and how becoming a couple changes everything.
We know they are keeping secrets from each other. There is a mystery letter that is somehow involved and this was a little overplayed, I thought, in a bid to create suspense that wasn’t really necessary. This is not a thriller, nor even the paciest of stories, but more of a gradual moving-through the lives of two people, finding out who they are and what they mean to each other.
I particularly liked the nostalgia element of the ’80s. Love Will Tear Us Apart has a magnificent soundtrack of Madonna, Bowie and Frankie Goes to Hollywood – listened to, of course, on a Sony Walkman.
If you enjoy emotionally truthful and insightful stories about relationships, with a twist or two and an element of drama, then this one is for you.