AMANDA, by H.S. Cross
H.S. Cross’s “Amanda” is a historical romance of a grand, old-fashioned and very British variety, with hints of L.P. Hartley, D.H. Lawrence and Evelyn Waugh — an impressive feat for an American author writing many decades after them.
The novel opens in the 1920s with Marion, a mysterious governess in London who is being haunted on several fronts: by her short-lived marriage to a violent man in Ireland that prompted her to flee for a job at a printing press in Oxford; by the loss of her beloved brothers in the trenches of World War I; by “the Talkers” she hears speaking to her inside her head; and, most recently and desperately, by her abrupt defection from Jamie, the upper-class university student she fell in love with while in Oxford. Without him, Marion carries on in “the waiting room that was her life,” facing “the grubby truth, the one that would kill you: She missed him.”
As the book begins, it’s been a year since Marion left Jamie without a word. Via flashbacks, the novel unwinds a complex and all-consuming romance that transcends the social and sexual mores of their time. Marion is poor and Irish, and Jamie is the son of a wealthy, controlling Anglican bishop. Like Marion, though, Jamie is also haunted: traumatized by mustard-gas attacks and other memories of the battlefield.
Cross’s close third-person narration feels a bit like sitting, devil-like, on the characters’ shoulders. But where the first section, told from Marion’s perspective, is smooth, subtle and often ravishing, even as it juggles multiple threads and timelines, the shift to Jamie’s perspective feels overwhelmed — nearly besieged — by the details and politics of his new life without Marion as the headmaster of a school for troubled boys.
One can imagine fans of the author’s other boys’-school novels, “Wilberforce” and “Grievous,” having a particular interest in these overlong passages. And Cross is a clever world builder, but in a tale with a fairly simple premise — romantic love against all odds, and especially against self-sabotage — the threads around Jamie’s story often feel like a tangled study in tedium.
“He’d wanted to be truthful,” Cross writes of him, “but sometimes the story was so intricate, the effort of deciding what pertained so vast, that he considered it more or less in the interests of health to give a précis or skip it altogether.” The reader detects some of Cross’s own difficulties here.
But even in the claustrophobia of Jamie’s perspective, Cross remains a talented ventriloquist. Her eye for detail and her romantic language transport the reader — particularly in the voices of Marion’s young charges in London, who are pampered and temperamental and yet believably charming; astute visions of the privileged, difficult people they will surely grow up to be.
There is also real daring and originality in her portrayal of the sexuality and sense of play between the central pair, who invent back stories complicated enough to compete with their real ones, shape-shifting as a way of bridging the gaps between their respective traumas. They take secretive trips to the seaside and even become new characters with new names for each other (if you’re wondering where the book’s title comes from).
“How would you call it theater when they’d no audience but each other?” the narrator asks. It is through these passages that the reader understands the combination of pain and performance that defines the couple’s romance and brings them together again in the novel’s final section.
Though sometimes tricky and bloated, the first and final sections of “Amanda” are compelling and ultimately convincing, which is one of the most difficult things a love story can be. Much like love itself, reading about Jamie and Marion’s journeys back to each other is both a thrilling and maddening pursuit.
AMANDA | By H.S. Cross | Europa | 327 pp. | $26
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