It is a work of choreographed lyricism and shifting points of view that reflects the restraint of its period. There is the film that director Michael Grandage has put on screen, an exquisitely made and acted story of a 1950s forbidden love triangle, involving Tom, his wife, Marion, and his lover, Patrick. Bethan Roberts has produced an intense and exquisitely raw yet tender novel, which proves her to be one of our most exciting young writers.Like the optical illusion in which a vase can also look like two faces in profile, My Policeman arrives as two things at once. It is a tale of wasted years, misguided love and thwarted hope, of how at a time when the country was on the verge of change so much was still impossible. Unfolding through the dual narratives of Marion and Patrick, both writing about the man at the centre of their lives, this beautifully-told, painful, tragic story is revealed. The two lovers must share him, until one of them breaks and three lives are destroyed. But in an age when those of 'minority status' were condemned by society and the law, it is safer for this policeman to marry his teacher. Patrick, a curator at the Brighton Museum, is also besotted with his policeman, and opens Tom's eyes to a world previously unknown to him. Unable to acknowledge the signs that something is amiss, she plunges into marriage, sure that her love is enough for both of them.But Tom has another life, another equally overpowering claim on his affections. And when he comes home from National Service to be a policeman, Marion, a newly qualified teacher, is determined to win him. From the moment Marion first lays eyes on Tom - her best friend's big brother, broad, blond, blue-eyed - she is smitten.
0 kommentar(er)
