Book Review: Ever Fallen in Love, by Zoe Strachan

by Zoe Strachan

Sandstone Press, 258pp, £8.99

Review by Tom Adair

The sad thing about having the time of your life is that you don’t necessarily recognise it when it’s happening. Three pages away from its ending this novel galvanises that truth when Richard, its 30-year-old protagonist, remembers a quotation he’s recently read about the Great War: “I lived my whole life between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one,” remarks an old soldier. “The rest,” he adds, “is the credits.” Richard understands this reflection. He feels its poignancy, the passing of life’s excitement, of old companions on that trail.

Now, a decade has passed since the heady years spent by Richard at university, the time, perhaps, of his life. Looking back, he is sardonic, mock-philosophical, amused. “You wouldn’t think that there were still women who could be ruined … but back then, in that university town by the sea, there were. It was quite an old-fashioned place. Luke was quite old-fashioned too … He knew how I felt about him, of course. By then I’d stopped even trying to conceal it.”

Richard and Luke are bound by affinity and background. Richard is reticent, Luke more socially at ease. Luke is from Edinburgh, Richard from a west of Scotland village. Both make too much of their working-class grit. “Class bound us together, me and Luke … We queued for matriculation behind Torquil and Timmy … alongside Jilly and Jocasta. [The university] had been my first choice … Partly, I confess, because it put me in mind of the re-runs of Brideshead Revisited on the telly.”

Readers hoping for, or expecting, the lavish hedonism and “ornamental language” (as Evelyn Waugh put it) of the original will find instead grubby bargain-basement revelry, pill-popping, opportunistic sex and downmarket pubs replacing the grandeur of country house living.

Strachan provides her duo not with a mansion but with a mouldering, ancient castle perched in deserted isolation. It is, among other things, their hideaway, a disaster waiting to happen.

The novel looks in two directions. It tells the story of their brief student days, of conquests, frustrations and, crucially, of the deepening bond of friendship broaching love and damaged emotions. The dominant viewpoint is that of Richard, whose voice recalls their student escapades and friendships, as well as the conflicts, misunderstandings and fleeting jealousies — Richard is hopelessly besotted, feelings utterly unrequited by the impetuous, hollow Luke who, psychologically, emotionally and physically seeks the knife-edge of risk and thrill. Richard is tugged into Luke’s dark vacuum.

The novel alternates this story with that of Richard’s present life, low key, mostly occupied with dreaming up computer games. He lives on the ocean-edge of Wester Ross, at work on “Somme”, the game which may launch him into a new stratospheric level of success. There he is visited by his younger sister, Stephie, an authorial device used both to familiarise the reader with Richard’s surroundings through Stephie’s eyes and, more crucially, to investigate Richard’s past, about which she is ignorant, and in particular probing the reason for his expulsion from university.

The pain of that turbulent past is resurrected and, as events recalled in first-person begin to converge on those dredged up by his sister’s probing, the novel takes on a powerful, suspenseful, darkening tension. This is underscored by two pressures — first, from the company producing Richard’s computer game to make it more commercial (less true to the characters he has conceived and to the values of the era of the First World War), alongside the sublimated but never extinguished urge on Richard’s part to find his old buddy.

The novel excels at evoking the mind games, the vile but subtly plotted erosion which one driven friend can exert on another. The first-person segments power the narrative, dragging the reader into the layers of tangled dependence as Richard falls foul of Luke’s excesses.

The third-person distancing, showing Richard, career-bound, and working within his own niche, is less engaging, in part since his chosen career is arcane and less than gripping, its politics irksome, its characters ciphers (intended irony?). And Strachan’s attempts to inhabit the masculine viewpoint are sometimes misjudged.

Nonetheless, Ever Fallen in Love (note the lack of question mark), is astute, intelligent, almost entirely convincing. I enjoyed it, but not as much as I admired it. Then again, as Richard discovers, you can’t have it all.