The Birth of Love, Joanna Kavenna’s first novel since her prize-winning Inglorious, is clever, ambitious and not wholly successful.
The Birth of Love, Joanna Kavenna’s first novel since her prize-winning Inglorious, is clever, ambitious and not wholly successful. It is a tribute to her skill that she handles her four narrative strands without lapsing into confusion; the reader is deftly directed on a journey through time and place. The danger is that emotional resonance is sacrificed to an over-schematic insistence on concept.
Her first story is based on historical fact. In 1865, Ignaz Semmelweis is confined to a Viennese lunatic asylum where he is barbarously treated. Semmelweis, a doctor, discovered that the many deaths in hospitals from puerperal fever were caused by doctors with unwashed hands coming straight from post-mortems to examine women in labour. After years of bitter struggle to have his theory accepted, he has fallen into a delusive state, overwhelmed by dreams of ‘torrents of blood’, the blood of the mothers and babies he could not save. Unfortunately, Kavenna tells this potentially fascinating story in stilted faux-19th-century prose — ‘In my years of studying the mad, or this category of humans we refer to thus …’ mixed with hackneyed phrases — ‘A room stinking of human fear’; ‘They are watching me and trying to destroy me’ — that muffle the horror of Semmelweis’ predicament.
His story is paralleled by a dystopian fable set in 2153, within an over-warmed Arctic circle. Overpopulation and destruction of habitat threaten the survival of the species. The ‘Protectors’ have excised love from the reproductive process. Women no longer bear children; their eggs are ‘harvested’ and their wombs are ‘closed’. Desire — male desire, at least — is catered for in government-run ‘Sexual Release Centres’. One woman somehow manages to become pregnant and carry her baby to term. Her followers, who revered her as a fertility goddess, are imprisoned and interrogated, accused of ‘anti-species conspiracy’. Again, Kavenna’s prose dilutes the effect she desires. This sub-Orwellian strand runs on predictable and repetitive lines. I was strongly tempted to skip.
Far more successful are the two narratives — just touching but not interwoven — set in London in 2009. Michael Stone, a hitherto unsuccessful writer, has published The Moon, a novel about Semmelweis. Petrified (as his surname suggests) by the unresolved failure of his relationship with his mother, he cannot seize the chance public recognition offers him to break free of the self-immolation in which his neuroses have trapped him. Stone’s catastrophic loss of nerve at his launch party makes painful but wholly credible reading.
Even more sympathetically depicted is Brigid, a woman struggling to deal with the onset of her second labour and the demands of her little son. I have rarely read such an accurate description of the emotional ambivalence of this stage of motherhood, the weird combination of boredom and passion, the seesawing between a sense of personal insignificance and its exact opposite. Brigid’s interfering but necessary mother (‘Your fridge is rather empty . . . I wasn’t quite as big as you’), her jolly post-partum friend (‘The whole thing is hell but it gets better’), her sticky toddler, her nice but almost-expendable husband . . . Brigid’s world, created with humour and sharp observation, reminded me of the best of Helen Simpson’s short stories. It is a pity that Kavenna has allowed her talent to be overshadowed by her taste for the portentous. I don’t want to sound like Brigid’s annoying mother, but I hope that, in her next novel, she’ll allow herself to settle down, and be content to show, not to tell.
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