The Mathematics of Love by Emma Darwin

• The word ‘math’ gives me a brain freeze, so the title The Mathematics of Love made me hesitant and I imagined a romance between calculus professors. Happily, this is not the case. Nor is it a fluffy soap opera, instead, it’s full of complex emotions and insights.Similar to books such as The English Patient, where two different stories unfold concurrently, this one cuts back and forth between the early 1800’s and the mid-1970’s, often in the same chapter. One seldom gets confused, because the 1800’s voice has an old-fashioned formality, whereas the modern one is looser and cynical.The earlier story centers on Stephen Fairhurst, who lost more than a leg fighting at Waterloo and elsewhere. When he returns to England after the war to claim an inheiritance, he meets Lucy, an artist and relative of some family friends, in the midst of shocking circumstances. Their friendship grows through letters and later, encounters. The possibility of romance is an undercurrent throughout the book.The modern half of the story stars Anna, an intelligent teenager whose life is rather aimless, mostly through no fault of her own. When her mother goes off with a boyfriend to open a hotel in Spain, she is sent to live with an uncle at a defunct boarding school. There’s no one left there but her uncle, her mentally unbalanced grandmother and an abandoned little waif, Cecil. Anna escapes this unsettling atmosphere by working for a neighbor couple, Eva and Theo, who are photographers. Through this relationship, Anna not only finds love and acceptance, but a connection to Fairhurst, whose estate is now her uncle’s home. Photography provides not only a metaphor, but also a shield, an opening, a stepping stone. It causes Anna to reflect,”And the sun moved on and took the day with it, while the plate held those shadows and kept them, and carried them to other places and to other times before it was found again. One of those times was mine.”The story travels from France to England to Brussels and Spain, each filled with local color. The past is evoked vividly with details of architecture and clothing, “a cartwheel of her hat”. I especially liked learning more about paper shops at the time, which served as places of gossip, political news and sometimes, the equivalent of singles bars. There are parts of the book that is truly disturbing, not just the war time incidents, either. Contributing to that feeling is the single page at the end of each chapter filled with nightmares, memories and fears. Some of those bothered me too much to finish reading them.It is amazing to think that this is a first novel, it has such depths and layers. Many authors never reach this level after a dozen books. I’m failing to do justice to how much Mathematics… impressed me. From the opening which left me gasping, to the poignant ending, it is an intricate tapestry of human relationships, the grip of the past and the redeeming power of possibilities.

  *In the interest of clarity, it must be noted that the author is a reviewer on this site. However, I don’t know her well enough to be a friend, which allowed objectivity in my review.

  Headline Review 2006 472 pp. ISBN 978-0-7553-3064-5