I Couldn't Love You More by Esther Freud
Review by Nicolas Townley
Esther Freud’s debut novel Hideous Kinky was released nearly thirty years ago and later adapted into a film starring Kate Winslet. This portrait of Freud’s early life in Morocco with her artist parents was recounted by a child narrator, allowing the reader to assemble the underlying facts and story. It is in the vein of her first novel that Freud’s ninth runs.
Daughter of British artist Lucian Freud, great-granddaughter of Sigmund, paternally Jewish and maternally Irish Catholic, the strands of Esther’s history are reimagined once again. Before the novel begins, the author offers a snapshot of her mother’s life straight up: pregnant at eighteen, unmarried, and terrified of being sent away by her parents to “a workhouse for morally defective girls and women.” This is a novel based around historical truth, in which the author questions what might have been. “Would her story have followed the path of so many thousands of other girls, and would anyone have intervened?”
John Martyn’s heart-wrenching song is in mind throughout, setting a tone of unconditional, near-ineffable, love — though only upon completion does the novel’s title begin to truly sink in. Snapshot vignettes of a simple moment in the character’s day. First-person memories and meanderings. An unknown and omniscient third-person narrator. Silent communion with an unhearing lover. Jarring cuts to frantic stream of consciousness at the most desperate moments of drama. Here is a modern novel –- a melting pot of the finest literary tactics. With each short chapter uncovering layers of detail and truths, the reader has breathing room to ponder a deeper understanding. There is more than is revealed and this is a key theme: the repressed, and all that remains unsaid. Over decades and changing times, certain things stay the same, repeating patterns, such as the Church’s power to heal and to hurt, the lingering of guilt and regret, the lives of women transformed by men, the strife inherent in having a child.
The point? In today’s world, where sharing your most intimate feelings and beliefs alongside what you had for breakfast or how fast you ran a 5K is the norm, it’s easy to forget how, not that long ago, the idea of opening up to even a close family member was certainly not the done thing. The title and novel become something else in light of this theme, managing to conjure the feelings of generations unknowingly repressed to the detriment of the lives of loved ones. Selfless love and passion acquainted with financial ruin and banishment. The black and white facts merged with the grey of the human endeavour to understand. Trauma passed on to the next generation, deepening like a coastal shelf. “God forgive me, for who would want a child born into such a world?”
Aoife asks herself this as the Blitz rages in London, having recently met Cashel, for whom she breaks off a prior engagement. In the sixties, their daughter Rosaleen will question the foundations of love, family, and society after meeting the artist Felix Lichtman in London. Thirty years later, Kate’s chapters verge on obsession in her attempts to understand what happened to her mother. The novel is constructed in magnificent detail and imagination through the memories and scenes of these women’s lives, Freud giving us access to the family’s world and how the same events appear transformed when viewed from the standpoint of a mother, a father, a daughter, or a granddaughter.
Aside from the brief and momentary distraction a rosary or a prayer offers, Freud makes clear her thoughts on the church’s power to resolve or address real human troubles. “Dear God, she tried from beneath the covers, what should I do? But for all that she listened no answer came.” In a religion with central teachings of love and kindness, the nuns of the convent are a scandal of hypocrisy, shaming and belittling the girls who come to them seeking aid and sanctuary. In agony, a girl in labour begs for mercy, to be told by Sister Ignatius that there is nothing wrong, “Nothing that you haven’t brought upon yourself. Nothing that couldn’t have been avoided by keeping your legs together.” A morality preaching shame is presented, where no answers or reprieve of any kind are to be found. “The price of sin, it seemed, was everlasting, and she saw that God, as she’d suspected, was godless.”
A product of this backdrop, we soon discover, is Cashel Kelly, Rosaleen’s father, trapped alongside the Sisters of the convent in the prison of their views, which are as cold and unmoving as the gravestones surrounding the convent. The girls are deemed sinful (“She’s made her bed, now she must lie on it.”) and their wellbeing foregone. A world where good Catholic women must endeavour to be the image of the Virgin Mary “along the long, humped drive” of modern life. Meaning is delivered with subtlety. Freud never presses the point, leaving the realisation for the reader, but the pain and trauma the women undergo is, more directly than the church, a result of the men in their life. Young love and promise quickly shift from the romantic to the real, evidenced in Cashel’s ancient masculinity and the destruction wrought by Felix and Matt’s lies.
Where horrendous suffering of young women under religious institutions was central to V. S. Alexander’s The Magdalen Girls (2016) and June Goulding’s The Light in the Window (1998), it never seems Freud’s intent to spend further time uncovering details of this dark history; the context is a given, a fact, a setting from which to explore how a family’s timeline can unfold. It is a novel that sticks with you and plays out like a film, which undoubtedly it must become. Ultimately, this is the story of Rosaleen –- what happens to her, interspersed by her family’s attempts to understand. I Couldn’t Love You More is therefore an homage to Esther Freud’s mother, Bernadine, who died aged 68 in 2011, four days after the death of Lucian Freud. What goes unsaid for too long is at risk of remaining silent forever.
I Couldn’t Love You More is published by Bloomsbury, 27th May 2021