Late in the Day
TESSA HADLEY
(Jonathan Cape, 288 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • Tel 020 7799 4064
In Sally Rooney’s runaway hit Conversations with Friends, three young women and one young man explore among themselves what used to be called free love and is now renamed polyamory, carefully discussing each fresh move in their bisexual dance, anxious that no one get hurt. The protagonists of Tessa Hadley’s seventh novel form an equally complicated and shifting quartet, but one from an earlier generation, experimenting within conventions of monogamous heterosexual marriage, sophisticatedly aware of language’s power to destroy trust as well as create new possibilities.
Adulterous love has long been a staple of fiction. How to make it new? Hadley’s solution, authoritative and powerful, involves weaving a complex story structure juxtaposing present and past and featuring carefully timed revelations. She employs free indirect narrative, a third-person narrator who jolts between closeups, over-the-shoulder intimacy, omniscient vision, reports of thought and feeling. The switchback speed of these perspective changes builds in authorial irony and detachment: the reader is privileged to suspect what’s looming long before the characters do.
