RIGHT AWAY, ONE HAS THE FEELING that this fine novel will in time be claimed by a movie deal. It is easy to picture film-goers reeling from the cinema, teary, uplifted, shaken, forlorn – some uttering "marvellous", others proclaiming that the
movie was "not as good as the book".
Some may even rush off to buy Rupert Brooke's poems. The wise, though (presuming they've never read it), will purchase a copy of The Great Lover, while others – devotees already – may hurry home to reread it at once. Time will tell.
I have read it twice. The first time at speed, for its onrushing vigour and narrative pull; the second, more slowly, allowing proper time to test the sentences, savour the detail of English society in the handful of years preceding the First World War, and most pleasing of all, to enjoy the author's obvious relish of the novel's central, teasingly rendered romance between Rupert Brooke and Nellie Golightly ("sounds like something out of a music hall", Brooke records in his commonplace journal on first meeting Nellie), a smouldering passion lasting a lifetime – which, in Brooke's case, was scarcely five years (he died in April 1915), but which for Nellie continued for more than seven decades, providing the starting point for the book, and taking us into a bitter-sweet, largely imagined world.
We begin in 1982. Nellie is 90 when a letter arrives at Grantchester from Tahiti; its sender, now aged 67, claims she's the daughter of the celebrated poet Rupert Brooke.
Arlice Rapoto writes: "My mother Taatamata always told me that my father was a very famous man, very pretty ... my mother said he never know about me. She loved him very much. She said he found his true heart in Tahiti and for the first time he was happy. I would like to read his letters but mostly hear his living voice, to know what he smelled like and sounded like. How it felt to wrap arms around him. I never married and have no children and now I am old I want to know: who was my father, what was he like … ?"
Nellie, delighted to have the letter, is better equipped than Arlice might dream to fulfil its demands. She writes a long and detailed reply, and sends, along with it, a biography of Brooke, his letters, a photograph, and a gift which Brooke had given her as a keepsake. She incorporates his poetry and some prose.
And she indirectly poses the question (clearly hinting that the matter is moot) as to who exactly deserved to be known as the love of Brooke's life – Nellie, Arlice's mother or maybe another?
The novel that follows tells the tale of two strikingly different sensibilities, and contrasting worlds – the tragic, rustic, hard-graft early life of Nellie, set against the gadfly self-indulgence practised by artists, with Brooke at the heart of it all, indulging his homosexual predilection, his exhibitionism, and his simultaneous pursuits of several young women. Brooke is lodging at Orchard Tea Rooms where Nellie lives as a maid-of-all-work. Her parents are dead, and Nell, the eldest of six siblings, labours to keep her family afloat. She flits back and forth to the family cottage to deal with emergencies (childbirth, illnesses, and the bees, when the swarm is loose), while Brooke flits back and forth to Europe and complains about his struggles to finish essays, conquer his poems, and captain a punt.
The two are instantly and mutually attracted. Jill Dawson lights the touch paper slowly and lets it glow with increasing intensity while it smoulders, keeping the reader's hunger at bay, but allowing us access through Nellie's dairy of events and Rupert's journal, into the private world of their longings.
The speed and rhythms of rural life, and the greater sense of the wider world of pre-war turbulence, of suffragettes laying siege to the status quo, and artists' coteries flouting convention – all this is rendered so unfussily, and in writing polished for clarity, not dazzling effect, that the reading becomes an almost physical pleasure.
Brooke of course lived, while Nellie is fiction, but sometimes the opposite seems the case, such is the power of Dawson's invention. She has added to Rupert Brooke's legacy without judging it, leaving the reader to make that call.
