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This review is spoiler free.

My Take in Brief: A beautifully written, deeply moving story of romantic renewal and moral repair set against the backdrop of a heartstopping journey across northwest India.

Setting: Victorian London and India, 1890s

Heroine and Hero: Bryony Asquith, brittle, socially awkward and emotionally scarred surgeon, and Quentin Marsden, popular, handsome and witty mathematician, playwright, adventurer.

Plot: The novel begins with a prologue, describing the courtship and short marriage of Bryony and Quentin. The first chapter begins with Quentin tracking Bryony down in India to notify her of a family emergency that requires her return to London. Most of the rest of the narrative takes place over the several weeks it takes them to get back to London, in the midst of the bloody Swat Valley Uprising.

Conflict: Something acute happened to cause the end of their marriage, and we find out what it is pretty quickly. But it was the botched handling of that conflict, and the underlying problems it represented, that consume Bryony and Quentin for most of the book.

Word on the Web:

Dear Author, Jennie, A

Everybody Needs a Little Romance, very positive

Dear Author, Jane, B-

Author Courtney Milan, very positive

My Thoughts on Nothing Much At All, very positive

TGTBTU, Lawson, A

Sakura of Doom, Oyceter,  negative (you should read this one. She complains about the vanishing of people of color in the book)

A spoiler full but super discussion at Could it Be… Seton?

Fun Factoid: Ms. Thomas on her work in an interview at Romance Bandits:

I think it is not so much heroes and heroines with shared pasts that draw me, but the idea of how do you deal with a relationship that has gone off the rails. How do you recover from that kind of disaster and rebuild? That fascinates me. It goes to the very foundation of what romantic love is. Is it a lesser entity–rising with lust and waning with time–or is it grand and beautiful, capable of the kind of forgiveness, understanding, generosity, and commitment that make life worth living?

I would like to believe the latter so I aspire to it in my books.

Racy Romance Review:

Anyone who is reading this right now has likely already read the Dear Author and TGTBTU reviews, so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here. I will say that if you liked Thomas’s two other books, Private Arrangements and Delicious, you will like this one, and if those didn’t work for you, I don’t think this one will, either. For my part, I thoroughly enjoyed all three books — they are all keepers for me.

In this review, I want to focus on what makes Thomas different from other historical romances authors I have read, and in ways that push at the boundaries of the genre:

1. Thomas’s writing achieves something remarkable: it evokes the lushness of Ivory or Kinsale while being spare and straightforward. Here’s an example:

She paid the cabbie and stood for a moment outside her house, head up, the palm of her free hand held out to feel for raindrops. The night air smelled of the tang of electricity. Already thunder rumbled. The periphery of the sky lit every few seconds, truant angels playing with lucifer matches.

And another:

From time to time, she would be at the most incidental activity — lacing her boots or reading an article on the adhesion of the intestine to the stump after an ovariotomy — and a physical memory would barrel out of nowhere and mow her down like a runaway carriage  … But mostly those upsurges of memory were nothing but ghost pains, nervous misfires from limbs that had long been since amputated.

The writing is not just lovely, it feels fresh and different. Thomas tries to find new and different ways to say the things that must be said in any romance novel. To take just two examples: it’s not “musk” between Bryony’s legs, but “turmeric tang”, Bryony’s hair is not “silky”, but”spread like the cape of Erebus”.

2. Readers of PA and Delicious know that Thomas favors a nonlinear narrative, or, at least nonlinear-lite, aka flashbacks. I like them. I feel they are now a part of the pop culture landscape — certainly well fitted to our multimedia, multitasking lifestyles — and serve as a way to make romance seem less stodgy than it really usually is. Think of Chuck Palaniuk’s Fight Club or Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (or heck, Virgina Woolf). Anyone who enjoyed Pulp Fiction, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Memento, Magnolia, Run Lola Run, Waking Life, Mulholland Drive, etc. has enjoyed a nonlinear narrative.

I am not saying Thomas uses flashbacks just to do something edgy.  A literary argument in favor of nonlinearity says it better reflects the ways our thoughts and memories and feelings actually work.  A story that’s about reinterpreting the past and reforging new bonds out of broken ones is served very naturally by flashbacks that connect the present action with the past.

3. Thomas has come to specialize in broken relationships, for reasons the quote above indicates. This is another way in which she is doing something different. Yes, we have other romances which feature a couple who have known each other in the past — maybe they had a one night stand as teens, for example — but it’s not common to find a couple who have known all of the full-blooded adult joy of romantic lovers, only to have it destroyed. This, of course, is what makes her books so heartbreaking to read, and this woman breaks my heart at least 3 times per novel (with the result that the poignant moments are that much sweeter. A favorite in this book is when Bryony notices Quentin at a funeral of one of her family members).

Most romances are about clean slates, in the case of the virgin heroine, the rake who has never known love. Or somehow the romance makes them clean, as in the heroine (or, in paranormal, the hero) who has been abused. I think what Thomas is doing here is different. At one point, Quentin says, “For the thousandth time, he wished he’d just met her.” But he didn’t, and all the muddy water under the bridge of their relationship doesn’t just flow out to sea with their first post-divorce coupling. It’s more like a windy lake they will always be navigating. But without it, they will be run aground. You can’t really begin anew. The past is done. All you can do it try to make new sense of what happened, give it new meaning in the context of the present.

Other books that feature separation often involve Big Misunderstandings. For example, in Judith McNaught”s Paradise, a book I also have on my keeper shelf, it’s the machinations of the heroine’s cruel father that keeps the lovebirds apart. Typically neither the hero nor heroine is truly guilty or truly flawed. Or if there is a flaw, it’s a flaw that somehow contributes to the desirability of the character, like the too-ambitious or too-driven-by-revenge hero. It’s a flaw but it’s also sexy.

In contrast, Thomas’s characters tend to be fully human, and therefore truly flawed. Quentin does something in this book that shocked my socks off. In any other book, a new hero would have been introduced to heal the heroine’s pain, and Quentin would have been given a red card, never to appear again in this novel or the next. Another envelope-pushing move.

Yet, while the event that separates Bryony and Quentin is his doing, the greater journey is taken in this book by the heroine as she comes to see that her own character flaws not only helped pave the way for Quentin’s moral error, but prevented their overcoming it when it happened. I can’t say more here without spoilers, but suffice to say that this book asks us to ponder what we mean when we say marriage vows. Are we vowing to do certain actions and refrain from others, or are we vowing to try to be a certain kind of person for our lover?  Bryony is truly unlikable at points in this book. She’s strong but not resilient, intelligent but not wise, educated but ignorant of her own feelings and motivations, at times selfish, vain, and cruel, and, deep down, heartbreakingly vulnerable and dependent. I loved her.

4. Thomas also manages to reverse gender roles in a Victorian romance and make it believable. Quentin is the nurturer, the emotional one, the domestic, while Bryony is the driven, take charge surgeon, the one who masks her feelings with an expression Quentin dubs “the Castle”. In this book, the heroine loves the hero for his beauty, not vice versa. It must be said, as much as everyone hates these terms: if there was ever a beta hero, Quentin is it. Yet he’s never less than totally appealing for this reader, because he is exactly what Bryony needs. And they’re both witty and funny when they want to be. Here’s an exchange near the end:

They are in bed, and Bryony is talking about the penis from a medical point of view — blood flow, arteries, etc.

She batted her eyelashes at him. “Don’t you want to know how I know all this?

“No.”

She laughed again. “Anatomy classes. Muscles and blood vessel diagrams. And dissections.”

Not dissections. He moaned. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

She lovingly wrapped her other hand about him. “I used to think the penis was very boring, tedious, and of no consequence whatsoever.”

“The ignorance of our educated women is absolutely shocking.”

There’s a point that I think all of us reach with some writers, a kind of unconditional enjoyment that leads you to overlook or minimize problems while reading. But writing a review forces your attention on weaknesses. Here they are, in my humble opinion (1) I did think Quentin’s bad behavior was so out of character that it needed something more, from his point of view, to help me fit it in with the otherwise utterly perfect man and husband he was. (2) I would also have liked to better understand Quentin’s love for Bryony in the early days.  (3) Bryony’s estrangement from her father and their abrupt reconciliation did not resonate with me as I suspect they were supposed to.

Thomas was thinking about the movie The Painted Veil while writing this, and I was thinking of The English Patient while I read it. So much of what caused them problems was London society, that it made sense to put them in a foreign land. Bryony and Quentin faced mortal peril on their journey (in case you are wondering, Thomas can write some great action scenes. I was truly terrified for the h/h during one of them in particular) –  but they had to in order to be jarred out of their estrangement.

As Quentin says at one point, “in that crucible, everything between him and Bryony had been distilled to the very essence: Only love had mattered, nothing else.” This book makes you believe it.

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