Book Review: The Amateur Science of Love

Book cover of The Amateur Science of Love by Craig Sherborne. Photo / Supplied

The Amateur Science of Love by Craig Sherborne
Text Publishing $40

This first novel by Melbourne-based, New Zealand-born Craig Sherborne is an intense, inexorable story of love’s progress into loathing, told in glaring light and amplified sound, raw yet astonishingly controlled — if you overlook the bits about rheumatoid arthritis.

Colin from the Waikato, growing up on 1000 jade-green acres, yearns to star on the London stage. He gets to the place but not to the prominence. Indeed, his acting aspirations fall as flat as a cowpat.

It doesn’t matter, because he meets yellow-haired, red-lipped, big-eared, wannabe artist Tilda, from Melbourne. Colin falls for her, whole-heartedly and hormonally. “How obsessed we were becoming. How exquisitely ill.” Even his pimples clear up.

Together, Col and Til journey to a dusty country town in Victoria (as one does). Scintilla — “drought-dead lawns and black swans cut from car tyres for landscape” — is to be the start of their perfect life. “There is no such thing, of course.”

Indeed. Traps of all sorts start to close. The pregnancy. The termination of the pregnancy. The one-year legal contract, the tedium and heat, and the cheesy lies of earning a living. The breast tumour.

The last alters everything. The plot slows, deepens. People and passing days take on extra significance. There are stunning renderings of despair and hope, devotion and impatience. Mortality seems ready to kick the 20-ish egotism and pretentiousness out from under Colin. Erratically, he begins to grow up.

Actually, no. Sherborne is too relentlessly honest (you can see why he’s such a successful memoirist) to settle for a formulaic finale.

Forensically and compassionately, he shows how self-interest reasserts itself, how tragedy and suffering don’t automatically ennoble. The protagonists are never spared. The final episodes are lacerating yet utterly credible.

In some ways, the plot — rapture, rupture, repair, ruin — is familiar territory. But the twangy, nervy short chapters, the jittery, finger-stabbing prose and the anatomising authenticity give it a force that never falters. A few characters such as Colin’s throwback parents and an estate agent in walk socks don’t make it past caricatures. A few images are pursued into cleverness, and a few jagged jokes (a stolen Van Gogh fake; a marriage celebrant who frets about being late for cricket umpiring) don’t quite know where to stand. But this is a breath-catching balancing act. You may want a mug of cocoa after reading it.

David Hill is a Taranaki writer.