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This is an utterly delightful book about love in all its many guises. Short, sharp chapters race through such love-facets as love of oneself, of country, of children and of freedom. It may be a short book, but it is jam-packed with vivid portraits, Greek landscapes, deceits, and therefore, quite naturally, that green-eyed monster, envy.
There is also mythology, both old and freshly minted. Sometimes the classical myths are given fresh legs by a spot of updating. Perseus, flying back from his encounter with the Gorgon, carries Medusa’s head in a travel bag and ‘made a stopover in Philistia’. A Short Book about Love embraces meditations on money – even though it asks ‘what is it, in the end – to the miser, to the broker, to the international banker, to the child with its porcelain pig, to the bookie at the race track, to the global entrepreneur – but a row of noughts?’ Woven throughout is the ongoing tale of that pair of all-too-tragic lovers, Tristan and Iseut, but in retelling their story, full of duels, journeyings, poisoned weapons and poisoned hearts, Nicholas Murray has found a useful frame within which to paint a busy canvas of other people falling in love, dealing with it, losing it. It is what Philip Larkin called ‘that much-mentioned brilliance, love’.
Murray has clearly been reading and thinking about love a lot – from Bill Clinton gifting a copy of Whitman’s The Leaves of Grass to Monica, or Thomas Love Peacock mocking the sleepless nights of the tormented literary lover. We meet an eighty-year-old man, who happens to be the saintly Nelson Mandela, finding love and marriage, consider logophilia, the love of words themselves.
Nicholas Murray has created a rattle bag of ideas, jokes and global wanderings – a sort of jotter of the heart. There will hardly be a reader who will not smile, or wince, or wonder at the ways of love, its twisting paths and days of impossible sunlight. It is full of pain and pleasure and insight. There is the poet’s musings: ‘Thus, though we cannot make our Sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run’. We find the philosopher and playwright Goethe’s opinion that ‘a world without love is no world at all’. And finally we realize that Nicholas Murray has written a book about love and with love, and that is a tenderness that moves us.
Jon Gower
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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Further Information: Love in all its guises is the subject of Nick Murray's wise and witty fiction. Woven into a comic re-telling of the classic legend of Tristan and Iseut - one of the world's greatest love stories - is the story of Felix, growing up in post-war Liverpool and, in the wake of a father's death, trying to come to terms with the meaning of what Philip Larkin, called "that much-mentioned brilliance, love". In between are narratives, playful and serious, on the irresistible topic. This sparkling pocket-epic spans the globe, from Greece to Italy, from China to Russia, offering walk-on parts to Nelson Mandela, Clinton and Lewinsky, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and countless other poets, philosophers, and legendary lovers, who have learned that "a world without love is no world at all".
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