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In 2019 London-based writer Claire Adam — one of an impressive number of Trinidad writers currently making a splash internationally — won the Desmond Elliott Prize for her debut novel Golden Child, about the family turmoil that follows when a twin brother goes missing. Her second novel comes six years later, and it was worth the wait.
Love Forms tantalises the reader right from the start with its unusual title, taken from a Louise Glück poem: “Love / forms in the human body.” It’s suggestive of different elements in the story: the sexual impulse; motherhood; our changing feelings for others.
The story opens with middle-aged Londoner Dawn Bishop recalling how, as a 16-year-old girl in Trinidad, she was once taken in a car by her mother and handed over to another car. From there she was brought to a house, and then a boat. It’s a great narrative tease: what’s going on? What Dawn recounts sounds like it could be a kidnapping — if her mother hadn’t initiated it.
Love Forms, we soon learn, is about a life with a hole in it. Dawn was being taken to a house run by nuns in nearby Venezuela, where she gave birth to a baby girl. Then the baby was taken away to be adopted, and removed from Dawn forever.
Cut to the present. Dawn is in her late fifties, and her life since that teenage pregnancy has been occupied by the usual navigation points: career, marriage, further children. But now she’s in reduced circumstances. She’s divorced, shunted from a big home in leafy Wandsworth to a terraced house in Brockley (“I miss those beech trees!”); and, having given up a medical career to raise two sons, is living alone now they’ve fled the nest. “The children feed off the parents. As they grow, the parents diminish.” This new sense of emptiness in Dawn’s life brings back the old emptiness. Where is her daughter? Who is her daughter?
Dawn is a fascinating narrator. She’s calm on the surface, even excessively restrained, at one point telling us, “I’m just going to come out and say that I took half a sedative pill,” as though confessing to an armed robbery. She reveals her turmoil in asides, as when she mentions that she’s a member of “at least a dozen” online adoption communities, which seek to match separated birth parents to their children. It’s through one of these portals that she encounters Monica Sartori, a 42-year-old woman adopted in Venezuela, who thinks she might be Dawn’s daughter.
This provides the engine of the plot. But as with Golden Child, Adam resists pursuing the surface story at full speed, and instead gives us a rounded picture of a complete life: or one almost complete. Our deepening understanding of Dawn’s character is revealed through the details she shares. She regularly returns to her birth country, leading her son to tell her, “You know, running off to Trinidad isn’t necessarily the answer to every problem.”
We get scenes of great intensity, such as the birth of Dawn’s first son, which transports her back to the experience with the nuns. Dawn recalls that when her daughter was adopted, her father declared, “It will be like it never happened” — a promise impossible to keep; a promise rendered impossible by its very expression.
With its rich creation of all the elements that make up a life, Love Forms achieves a sort of alchemy. Even when there isn’t much happening — accounts of her sons’ jobs; reflections on her marriage — it all goes to nourish the reader’s understanding of Dawn’s character. She feels real. A book that started by tantalising the reader ultimately delivers satisfaction. Dawn, in her quest to plug the hole in her life, makes us ask what success would look like anyway. To find her daughter would be an ending: but life — this life, the only life we have — is all about continuing.
Love Forms by Claire Adam Faber £16.99/Hogarth $28, 304 pages
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