‘He now wants only to leave, he wants never again to enter the closed chamber of his marriage….’ Leaving, by Roxana Robinson

February 23, 2024 at 5:37 pm (Uncategorized) (Book review, book-reviews, books, fiction, reading)

As the novel opens, Sarah, a divorced woman of sixty years or thereabouts, is leaving an opera house. At the foot of the stairs, she sees a frail elderly woman standing still, completely immobilized by fear. She offers her arm to assist, and together they slowly ascend the staircase. (As I’m reading this I’m saying to myself, She’s writing a novel about my mother!)

On this same occasion, Sarah runs into Warren, an old flame now married, from her youth. He has become, in the intervening years, a fanatical opera lover. What happens next is both inevitable and predictable. I was thinking, Oh no, this tired trope again. But then I remembered the lines from Ecclesiastes:

What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.

What makes a situation new is the individuals who are at its center: what they feel, what they do, how they act and react. (And I, like many, should know this, from personal experience.) As the novel progressed, Sarah and Warren became increasingly vivid in my eyes. Their fates became a matter of urgency.

The cover, by the way, is a reference to Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, a painting by John Singer Sargent:

This most poetical work plays a small but crucial role in the drama.

( As you may have surmised, the characters in this novel occupy a rather elevated cultural stratum. As an aid to decompression after an extremely stressful experience, two of them launch into a discussion of the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro.)

This novel is certainly about leaving, but questions tantalize: Who is leaving whom? or what? And finally, why? (The title of this post is only a partial answer, and a misleading one at that.) I don’t want to give away any more.

Finally I have to say, that Leaving is the most discussible novel I’ve read in ages. When I finished it, i found myself wanting rather urgently talk to someone about it. The unexpected developments in the plot, the actions of the various dramatis personae, the workings of an unknowable fate….If you read it – and obviously I recommend strongly that you should – please leave a comment in this space. As soon as possible!