Craig Sherborne
Text Publishing
Otago Daily Times, June 18th 2011
Journalist Craig Sherborne has written poetry, drama and two critically-acclaimed volumes of memoir, but The Amateur Science of Love is his first novel.
Like Mary Horrock’s The Book of Lies, the story is confessional, and is equally impressive. It details the long and troubled history between the narrator, Colin, and his wife Tilda (I don’t know if the name was intended to conjure up images of Tilda Swinton, but as a piece of characterisation it worked remarkably well for me). When they first meet in London, Colin and Tilda fall for each other deeply and instantly, but as time and the novel progress their love curdles and toxifies into loathing.
Although cracks appear early in the relationship, the more fragmented it becomes the more deeply entangled they find themselves. Trapped in a tiny town deep in Victoria with a mad woman who will not let him leave, the author, Colin, is now baring his soul. Why is left unspoken, but one dreads to think what the writer is preparing for.
I kept getting flashes of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane although I couldn’t quite decide who is Blanche and who is Jane in this poisonous pas de deux; whilst the reader cannot help but empathise with Colin, we only have his version of events and as such must regard him as an unreliable narrator and he only admits as much culpability as is necessary to appear sympathetically fallible (he feels duty-bound to stay when Tilda is diagnosed with breast cancer, for example). Yet who among us is pure enough to cast the first stone? We all want to present and regard ourselves in the best light.
It is testament to Sherborne’s skill as an author that the reader can take Colin’s side while simultaneously imagining how the same events might appear from Tilda’s perspective. For all that it disturbed me deeply, I was unable to put this novel down.
https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/no-bluffing-two-debut-novels-live-early-promises
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