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Esther Freud |
Freud’s Italian feast fails to satisfy
Love Falls. By Esther Freud. Bloomsbury £12.99
This sixth novel from the author of Hideous Kinky should be avoided like the plague if, like me, you are trying to lose weight – there are so many descriptions of gorgeous Italian food!
Love Falls is the saga of 17-year-old Lara travelling with Lambert, her father, to Tuscany to stay with a surly friend, Caroline. Caroline is ill and never stops “appraising” her with heavy judgments. The illness and the heavy judgments are intimately connected. We shouldn’t forget Esther Freud’s grandfather was a master psychiatrist
After what feels like several billion lifetimes, Lara meets her first love, Kip, among Andrew Willoughby’s extended tribe of young people, “rife with illicit alliances and vendettas”, to quote the blurb. It is not exactly a love that grabs the reader’s interest.
In Hideous Kinky, Esther describes her heroine exploring the Big Wide World – ie parts of the Far East – but with her mother on her back like a very heavy piece of luggage. They travelled much further afield, and smoked far more hashish than Lambert and Lara do in the new novel, which must have been one of the reasons it was made into a film.
Lambert is a writer who never stops working on his magnum opus about the history of Great Britain, even when he is supposedly on holiday. He and Lara hardly know one another when they set off on adventures, which take well over 50 pages to get even remotely into orbit.
By page I23, Ginny (Caroline’s cook) “had packed them a bag of supplies, great melting slabs of sandwiches, thick with ham and mozzarella, glued together with olive oil, and a basket arranged with half a dozen different kinds of fruit.”
By page 150 the love interest between Lara and Kip has got under way and the sex has taken over from the food. Esther Freud throws in other plot twists and turns to maintain our interest. But it’s too late in the day. By the end we know that sagas about the upper middle-classes are an anachronism. They don’t exist any more in multiracial England. Thank God!
John Horder |
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