BOOK OF THE DAY: CATHERINE HEANEYreviews The Great Lover; By Jill Dawson; Sceptre; 310pp, £12.99
THERE’S ALWAYS a danger with novels based on real-life characters that, while negotiating the tightrope between fact and fiction, the story falls flat.
Sighs of relief all round, then, that in The Great Lover, Jill Dawson doesn't put a foot wrong.
She has written novels about real characters before (in the Whitbread shortlisted Fred and Edie), and this time takes as her subject the poet Rupert Brooke – that most gilded of youths, who died in 1915 on his way to Gallipoli, and whom Yeats famously called “the handsomest young man in England”.
Seamlessly weaving together snippets of Brooke’s letters and poems with her own lively prose, Dawson delivers a story that is both entertaining and evocative of a very specific moment in history, while creating an inner life of real depth for her young hero.
The novel opens as 90-year-old Nell Golightly receives a letter from a woman in Tahiti, claiming to be Brooke’s daughter and asking about him (Brooke is thought to have fathered a child in the South Seas during a sojourn there in 1913).
Nell writes back saying she had indeed known him when she served as a maid at the Orchard Tea Gardens in Grantchester, where he lodged.
This fictional exchange of letters opens a way for Dawson to go back to 1909, to a hot summer when the poet and his Cambridge acolytes swam naked in Byron’s pool, fell in and out of love, and debated the fate of the working man over endless tea, scones and honey (oh, so much honey).
The narrative alternates between 17-year-old Nell’s clear-eyed and often caustic observations of Brooke and his friends and the poet’s own reveries, and it is in these two voices that Dawson’s novel transcends the historical facts and truly comes to life.
In Brooke, her effortless blending of the known details of his life – his fraught love affairs, travels and development as a poet – with a vivid emotional portrait creates a character of real complexity.
Yes, he is narcissistic – “there is something so choking, so suffocating about being adored,” he complains – and self-regarding, veering between pomposity and frivolity, but equally he is disarming in his insecurities, confused as he is by his sexuality and haunted by an unhappy family life.
More to the point, by endowing him with self-deprecating humour and warmth, Dawson manages to conjure up the legendary charm that seemed to bewitch every woman, and many of the men, Brooke met. In contrast, the wholly fictional character of Nell allows her to explore that other side of pre-war England: a world where women’s choices were stark and few, and where poverty and toil were the norm for most.
Yet Nell is more than a cipher. Her emotional conflict, as she inevitably falls under Brooke’s spell, is moving, and her descriptions of the sights and smells of the lush, buzzing English countryside are among the most beautiful in the book.
Dawson is careful to keep the love story that develops between her characters from descending into bodice-ripping in the scullery: indeed, while sex (or the tantalising prospect of it) hovers constantly in the background, most actual instances if it are treated with a subtle eroticism. Nowhere more so than in the final section, where Brooke travels to the South Seas, to ultimately become the “great lover” of the title.
Tahiti provides a dreamier, darker setting, where Brooke the poet can come into his own and where the author herself explores more creative territory – leaving the sun-dappled romanticism of Grantchester, and its more innocent times, behind.
Catherine Heaney is features editor of the GlossMagazine