Love Forms by Claire Adam review – the power of a mother's loss
Claire Adam's 2019 novel Golden Child was her debut, but it felt like the work of a master. It was tender, ravishing, shattering – you believed every word of it. The book had an effortless narrative authority that most first-time novelists would kill for.
Love Forms is every bit as alive and convincing, and returns us to Trinidad, with its potent fizz of colour, heat and political instability. But unlike the earlier book, it's also set partly in south London – the writer's own home turf – and has a mother, rather than a father, at its heart.
Dawn, our 'white, young, rich' narrator, is the youngest child of a well-known Trinidadian fruit juice dynasty. At 16, after a brief encounter with a tourist at carnival in Trinidad, she finds herself pregnant. Petrified of the stigma, her otherwise caring parents make a 'pact' never to speak of it again, dispatching her, under cover of darkness, on a terrifying and chillingly evoked boat trip to Venezuela. Here she spends four months with nuns who deliver her baby – a girl she never sees again – then is returned to Trinidad to resume her schooling as if nothing has happened.
But something has happened. And 40 years later, now an ex-GP living in London, divorced with two grown-up sons, Dawn is still bereft, still searching. Not just for her daughter but, because her memories of her time in Venezuela are so cloaked in shame and secrecy, for what feels like a missing part of herself.
Her family kept to their pact and the episode has never again been mentioned, but for Dawn the questions have only grown more pressing with time. What part of Venezuela was she sent to? Who exactly were the nuns? Most of all, who was that traumatised teenage girl who gave up her baby so easily? After years of emotionally exhausting research – letter writing, internet forums, DNA tests – she's still no closer to the truth. And then one night a young woman in Italy gets in touch. So many of her details seem to fit. Could this be Dawn's long-lost baby?
It's a situation rich with logistical and emotional possibilities, all of which Adam mines with subtlety and finesse. What could all too easily have been a straightforward case of will-she-won't-she find her long-lost child is somehow both more mundane and more unsettling.
Would Dawn have had a better life if she'd kept her baby? In many ways, probably not: she was able to go to medical school and make a career for herself. Yet still the terrible, unspoken loss has left its mark on every member of the family: not just her parents, but her older brothers, her somewhat disengaged ex-husband and her sons, whose understandable priority is to protect her from further hurt.
It's her parents who, believing they were acting in her best interests, are most infuriated by Dawn's apparent inability to hold on to the good life she's made for herself. 'The man had enough!' her mother explodes in frustration when, after years of putting the search before everything else, her daughter's marriage breaks down. All they ever wanted was for her to have done well despite her 'trouble' – her mother's elation at noting, on a visit to the marital home in leafy Wandsworth, that she has a cooker with eight rings, is a lovely touch.
Still, Dawn's abiding sense of loss, the instinctive feeling of her daughter's absence, which 'always arrived somewhere in my abdomen, the sudden shock, like remembering laundry left out in the rain or children not picked up from school', is something whose power cannot be overestimated. Adam is great on the unsaid, the half-said, and the way feelings will unravel and morph over the years. 'Mothers will fight off lions,' Dawn tells her father in a rare, late moment of reckoning. 'Actually it was you I should have been fighting … you were the lion. I didn't realise it back then.' It's credit to this novel's ability to wrongfoot you that at this moment you find yourself feeling a flicker of sympathy for her father.
And this sense of uncertainty and unease continues to the end. The final pages, which unfold at the family's beach house on Tobago, are as gripping as any thriller, and the ending, when it comes, feels as right as it is devastating.
Love Forms by Claire Adam is published by Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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