Last year is best

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’.