The Weight of Love review: Hilary Fannin’s debut novel sears itself on the brain

The Weight of Love

Author: Hilary Fannin

ISBN-13: 978-1781620458

Publisher: Doubleday

Guideline Price: £13.99

A novel by Hilary Fannin, Irish Times columnist and author of the highly acclaimed memoir Hopscotch, arrives on a wave of expectation. The Weight of Love must, perhaps unfairly, carry the weight of the love for Fannin’s work that has gone before. A fiction debut from a woman who has mastered the art of truth is already enticing, and the premise accentuates the anticipation.

In a dual narrative split between London in 1995 and Dublin in 2018, Robin and Ruth are two-thirds of a love triangle, the shaky foundations on which a marriage is built and friendships are tested. In the prologue, Robin introduces Ruth (the woman he is in love with) to his best friend, Joseph, the elusive, passionate artist type that women seem to always fall for and seldom escape unscathed. Ruth is no exception. And yet, when the timeline jumps forward to Dublin 23 years later it is Robin and Ruth who are married. What has happened in between?

Asking the reader to invest in backstory for 50 per cent of a novel is high-risk. Flashbacks are so often guilty of killing momentum – impatience can creep in as we crave progression past what we think can be assumed. It is easy to read the blurb and jump to conclusions about how the three became two and why allegiances shifted. Fannin, however, skilfully negates the risk by creating a very particular story and executing it with steely nerve. The outline may sound like a classic love story but the author has coloured it in with unique storytelling, creating electric characters with individuated arcs. The more I knew, the less I was sure of, and the more I had to know.

Despite us knowing, at least in part, the future outcome, it is nerve-racking to observe the jeopardy they are in

The execution of both timelines is very even-handed, with Fannin deftly switching between the two. If anything the London past is even more compelling in its evocation of the halcyon days of twentysomething naivety, possibility and tumultuous first love when that is still something to believe in. The narrative tension is at its most taut as the youthful Robin, Ruth and Joseph self-destruct in the big city. Despite us knowing, at least in part, the future outcome, it is nerve-racking to observe the jeopardy they are in. It is impossible to look away as they crash into each other with little regard for the consequences. Empathy is born out of a bitter-sweet nostalgia captured by Fannin for that time in life that so many people feel but seldom articulate. Waiting for life to happen without realising: this is it. Desperate to shake off the youth that is wasted.

Acute pain

Without resorting to cliche or stereotypes, Fannin has tackled a universal tale of heartbreak and made it feel entirely personal to her triumvirate of lost lovers. She is excellent at capturing the acute pain felt when a blow lands that, despite the sense of its crushing inevitability, still manages to surprise. In the cafe, when the three first meet, “what would happen had somehow already happened, the loving and mourning had already begun and already ended.”

The weight of love in the book, however, is not just one of romance – it also poignantly observes the beautiful burden of parental love, both in the giving and receiving, and in the aftermath of its absence. The complicated relationships between duty and love are deconstructed without any didactic position of should/should not. Complex dynamics between offspring, as children and adults, with their parents are held up to the light in all their painful, powerful glory. Fannin is excellent on going home – especially when the heart struggles to recognise it as that.

This book is, if not quite dangerous, at the very least disquieting

The epilogue to conclude the book felt almost superfluous – the last note of the final chapter chimed perfectly for this reader as was – but will be welcomed by many who need a greater sense of closure. Either way this novel lives on long after reading with some lines burned in the brain: the “rosary of recognition” you recite walking past landmarks on your way home, a man with “a three-piece suite of sadness inside him”.

This book is, if not quite dangerous, at the very least disquieting. If you have bruises still of lost loves, unpulled threads, unfinished business, this book will push them. As Ruth considers in the book, “you cannot monogamize memory. In the end, Anne Enright once again said it best: “This is heartache for grown-ups.” Fannin proves the efficacy of fiction as a medium for truth – and in doing so, exceeds all expectations.