AS A NOVELIST, LOUISE DEAN IS fearless when it comes to tackling large and apparently intractable subjects. Her first novel, Becoming Strangers, written in her early thirties, dealt with the emotional lives of two couples, one middle-aged, one elderl
y, and won the Betty Trask award. Her second, This Human Season, was set in Belfast in 1979 and viewed the Troubles through the eyes of characters on opposite sides of the conflict.
Her third novel, The Idea of Love, considers family relationships, the nature of love and also of sanity. It is set in the South of France (where Dean lived for a period), in "one of the small market towns that are on the crossroads of rip-you-off Riviera and rob-you-blind Provence". Here two expatriate families have settled: Richard, an executive with a French pharmaceutical group, relocated with his French wife, Valerie, and their son, Maxence, when his firm promoted him to a job in Antibes; and his neighbour, Jeff, a hippyish American with an English wife, Rachel. By degrees Richard and Jeff fall into a drinking intimacy in the course of which they tell each other something of their lives beyond the confines of their families – lives of frequent, fretful infidelity. "Sometimes people tell stories for a reason," writes Dean, "but the story is always bigger than the storyteller."
Sure enough, her families rapidly become involved in narratives larger than themselves: in each case, the crisis is provoked by a trip to Africa. Richard's job in the lucrative market of psychopharmaceuticals leads him to consider the nature of sanity, both generally and on a painfully personal level, when his son begins to exhibit disturbing symptoms and his grip on his own sanity seems insecure. Jeff and Rachel, meanwhile, travel to Africa in search of an African war orphan to adopt but find themselves forced to reassess what is meant by "family", "love" and – that old, unfashionable Biblical term – "charity".
Dean cites writers such as José Saramago and Albert Camus as influences, and certainly her intellectual seriousness in The Idea of Love is not in doubt. Her acknowledgments page offers thanks to the World Psychiatric Association and the Master and Fellows of Downing College, and refers to scholarly papers on mental illness in rural Ethiopia and immigrant communities, and to Julian Jaynes's book The Origins of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind.
The issues she explores in her fiction are undoubtedly of the utmost interest, but her readers may wish that she would take that as a given and refrain from belabouring the point. Faced with lines such as "The prostitute had done what the psychiatrist couldn't," the most sympathetic reader may have the sensation of being lectured as though at a public meeting. Nor has Dean a light hand with a simile: "Giraffes moved across the plains like churches with nodding steeples," is one of many such over-wrought devices.
Somewhere beneath the making of points and the hectic imagery there lies an interesting, jaded voice longing for – but only half-believing in – the possibility of innocence. Perhaps for the next novel Dean should lay off the research and put more trust in the evident power of her imagination.
The full article contains 552 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
