I acquired this book almost by accident. I had finished the book I was reading and popped into a local newsagent to pick up something to read on my 1.5-hour commute home. Since the day was almost over, I discounted newspapers, and, browsing the magazine shelf, I saw that Red Magazine was giving away a book, making it the best value in terms of amount of reading material per pound.
I had not heard of Maggie O’Farrell, and judging by the cover and girlie magazine source, I expected full-blown chick lit. The first thing that struck me when I started to read it was the quality of the language and the writing style. The main narrator, Lily, is introduced to us, falling from a taxi, in a passage that is representative of the author’s powers of description:
“She steps from the taxi, pushing at the metal weight of the door, clutching cigarettes, change and the thorned stems of the roses. Sarah says something to her over the taxi roof and she half turns. She’s aware too late of her foot catching on the granite curve of the curb, and the next moment she is airborne, falling upwards.”
In many ways, My Lover’s Lover is a story of disorientation, falling in love without anything solid to grasp, but only this awareness of the body and the effects upon it of the lover of the title. Lily meets Marcus at an exhibition opening and such is his attraction that she moves into his designer flat almost without thinking, and certainly within very few weeks of meeting him. We see her change from a perfectly ordinary London girl—OK job, nice friends, local family—to a woman haunted by the ghost of Marcus’s previous lover, whose presence surrounds her in the flat—as she eats her dinner in the kitchen, watches TV in the living room, makes love to Marcus in the room that once belonged to his ex.
Lily becomes obsessed with Sinead, the woman she sees everywhere and of whom she suspects Marcus cannot stop thinking. Marcus is a strangely silent character, unable or unwilling to discuss his past love, how it ended or what happened to her, and Lily is wary of pushing him for answers, thinking it would be insensitive to pry into his bereavement. As time passes, her imagination runs riot, and she worries that Sinead was murdered, or that she is not, in fact, dead.
The novel moves seamlessly from romance when Lily meets Marcus, through gothic horror as she becomes aware of the ghost in the apartment, to detective story as she pieces together the shards of Sinead’s old life. In essence, Lily stalks Sinead, until we hear her voice tell the love story of Marcus and Sinead. The first-person narrative of their meeting is cut with a third-person (Lily’s?) account of the relationship’s horrific end. This technique works well to heighten our suspense, and offsets the knowledge that Lily and we think we possess of Marcus’s lover and their past together.
My Lover’s Lover tells the story of unresolved relationships and the damaging effects they have on our lives. As readers, we witness first-hand the dysfunctional nature of Lily’s relationship with Marcus—unable to discuss his ex, so far removed from his friends to be unable to ask them, constantly threatened by a ghost from the past. From a slight distance we read the sudden demise of Sinead’s five-year relationship with the same man. We see the recovery of only one of these women, and are left questioning why this breakdown had to happen to the other. This is the nature of broken love—so often unanswered questions are all that remain.
I started reading this novel thinking it would be chick lit—a light, airy romance. I finished it feeling unsure how to classify it. Certainly it is a book to be enjoyed more by most women than most men, but it has many more layers than the usual boy-meets-girl-while-stressed-by-work-or-the-biological-clock-tale. Maggie O’Farrell writes beautiful, poetic prose that carried me through to the end of My Lover’s Lover and left me determined to read her first work, After You’d Gone. In one phrase, I would sum this book up as a modern elegy to lost loves.
