‘A tired set of clichés and underdeveloped plots and characters’ – Love Me Tender by Jane Feaver

Jane Feaver’s Love Me Tender is a collection of linked short stories. ‘Oh – one of those‘, I thought, picking it up between finger and thumb (metaphorically speaking; I’m really more of a book-mauler).  I shouldn’t admit to a bias, I know, but  I am suspicious of the genre – if ‘genre’ it is.  It usually strikes me as a gimmick, even though when it works it’s golden – Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, for instance, is beautiful, and everyone tells me that Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge is brilliant.  Well, not to cast any aspersions upon Ms Strout and her work, but everyone also told me that Love Me Tender was brilliant.  I cast my scepticism aside and got stuck in.  Now, having finished it and mulled it over, I’m not sure if those people have been reading the same book as me.  The Guardian call it ‘subtle and compassionate’, and the Independent say it ‘confirms the author’s considerable talent.’  Now, I haven’t read Feaver’s previous offering, so I don’t know whether this book is a departure for her or a continuation of similar themes – but when I read Love Me Tender, I read a tired set of clichés and underdeveloped plots and characters, linked in a pointless, and, yes, gimmicky fashion. 

There’s twelve stories here, all set in the English village of Buckleigh, with the same characters re-appearing in each tale – presumably in an attempt to give depth or resonance to the stories.  Hovering in the background is the ever-present village brass band, and the local pub, the Red Lion, is a regular setting.  The stories deal with private, personal events, often revolving around love-affairs – a newcomer’s affair with the village mayor, a teenage girl’s pregnancy, an old man coming back to the place he was evacuated to during the war, a betrayed wife’s murderous revenge.  It’s an easy read, and, to give Feaver credit, it’s full of emotion and there’s enough shock and action in there to keep the reader entertained – a caravan set on fire, burning two people to death; a child almost drowning; a  cross-dressing pensioner found dolled-up and dead in a B&B.  My favourite (I’m not entirely negative!) was about a brother and sister coming to terms with their different lives as they grow up and apart, and how the sister deals with the simmering homophobia of their isolated community.

Still, I’ve got two main problems with the book.  Firstly, setting all these individual stories in the same place/time means that it’s easy to skimp on the detail within each story.  I felt short-changed at times because it felt like Feaver was only skimming the surface with her characters and plots, assuming that each story would be enriched by the surrounding tales, when in fact I found them all too brief and scattered to be truly affecting.  The teen-pregnancy story, ‘Testing’, for instance, stars Wendy, a young waitress who’s gotten knocked up by her older boyfriend, and who’s got an unhappy relationship with her mother.  The next story, ‘I Wish My Wife Was This Dirty’ deals with Wendy’s mother and stepfather and covers the same events as ‘Testing’, but from the stepfather’s pint of view; there’s plenty of material here, and the relationships are sketched out well, but sketched is all they are.  You could get a novel out of this set-up, and I’m not implying that a short-story can’t be just as powerful, but in this case, my impression was that Feaver was so anxious to carry us along to the next vignette – to create a busy, multi-layered narrative – that each little bit wasn’t given the space or attention it needed.  If the stories were all stand-alone, I think she might have gone into more depth with each one, rather than hoping that the linking device would carry them.  If you dipped in and out of this collection rather than reading it in one go, like a novel, I think you’d be disappointed by the individual stories.

Secondly, the writing itself didn’t do it for me.   The author’s got a very poetic sensibility, and there’s lots of lovely imagery – the white material of a t-shirt ‘rises like petals’ in a pool of water,  someone’s first kiss is ‘a invasion of teeth’ –  but at other times it’s overdone and false: ‘Liquid glugged to the surface of the flask and sat just below the rim like an old penny’, or clichéd: ‘There was something clean and untouched about her, the first, precious flower of the season’, or just plain stiff: ‘It was remarkable to Stan how quickly Bertram was able to recover his composure.’  Also, the point of view jumps all over the place in many of the stories’ again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but when you’ve already got a cacophony of voices throughout the collection, and the stories themselves are pretty short, it means that the emotional heart of the stories gets lost.  The opening tale is about a single mother who embarks on a couple of affairs after moving to the village with her kids; in the first six pages we get three different character’s perspectives, and by the end it’s hard to really know or care what the main character feels about her situation.

Any Cop?:  I found it a disappointing volume; the conceit of the interlinked stories dominated the stories themselves, which seemed underdeveloped and flimsy despite some interesting set-ups.  It’s got good reviews elsewhere, but I wouldn’t recommend it. 

Valerie O’Riordan