Love Without Hope

Rodney Hall

MacMillan

Otago Daily Times, May 19th 2007

Love without Hope is a study in survival, and an exploration of one woman’s refusal to submit to forces that are entirely beyond her control.

Mrs Shoddy does not know why she is confined, why the Master in Lunacy refuses to understand that she is sane and that she must return to her farm to care for her horses. Fragile as a moth battering at a lighted window, she struggles to escape, while outside the asylum the petty-minded townsfolk who have exiled her here move in greedily on her property.

With memory Mrs Shoddy’s only freedom, she retreats into her imagination and her long lost lover, Martin. She does not know where he is, where he has been, or when and how he will rescue her; the only certainty in her life is that he will come. Is Martin real or is she truly mad? I was no more certain at the end than at the beginning, but does this really matter as long as this love keeps her alive?

Hall’s novel is intensely claustrophobic; an intense, bitter condemnation of the greed and cruelty that can flower in small (and not so small) town society, and the de-personalisation and disempowerment we inflict upon the mentally ill. But it is also a celebration of the endurance of the human will and its ability to grasp the smallest of reasons to survive, even when every hope is gone.