Judi Herman reviews Jacobson’s latest novel: a lyrical and provocative exploration of a love affair through time

In his latest novel, Jacobson’s authoritative wit is at its best as he follows his protagonists through years spent together, through old age and eventual decline, in what his publisher describes as ‘a funny, passionate, lyrical and provocative exploration of a love affair through time.’

The ‘time’ is a period of decades, the forty-something protagonists are lovers mature in years and already veterans of a range of experiences when they meet. Neither has decisively left their marriage partners on paper at least, although all four spouses have embarked on affairs at some point. 

Sam Quaid is an award-winning playwright. Don Juan in Oxford, his cherished early show-off play gives a clue as to what sort of arts-page celebrity he is – or at least had been – he surmises. Lily is a high-powered award-winning television documentary maker. They meet to plan a programme to be made in an exotic location, about the well-travelled DH Lawrence (the idea inspired by Quaid’s play Ibsen in Sorrento). Eventually they delightedly decide on Taos, New Mexico and embark on a rapturous love affair and joyful journey together around exotic locations.

As a lover, Sam is haunted by the memory of Miss Gore, the English teacher who called him out as a schoolboy and rubbished the poet Andrew Marvell’s hyperbole when describing the years he would dedicate to seducing ‘His Coy Mistress’: “Two hundred to adore each breast”.

Jacobson’s writing is extraordinarily rich in apposite quotes and literary references, usually explained if it enhances rather than holds up his narrative and even used for comic effect. When Lily rings Sam, agonising over his silence after their joyful time in Taos, his wife Selena picks up the phone. “Of course she did. The wife picking up the phone is as integral to the saga of illicit love as a fat man dressed as a widow is to pantomime”, comments our narrator.

Alongside the abundant quotations, there is perception and extraordinary beauty in Jacobson’s own writing on passion: “they realised the conversation WAS the lovemaking. He eased himself into her in words”. 

It’s certainly true conversation is a vital part of their lovemaking, but there is plenty of graphically described action too, including some pretty hardcore S&M, as Sam discovers a penchant for bondage and submission and Lily realises that playing the dominatrix is a role that suits her. They seal their bond by buying a pretty – and effective – belt on their travels, a useful talisman for that part of their sex life as they pursue it in ever more exotic locations. Unsurprisingly they include Amsterdam’s red-light district, where Lily dresses to impress and plays her part on the streets.

Their agonising self-searching about themselves and each other is a vital part of the narrative, as is the exploration of their wider relationships. Although the heat has gone out of Sam’s relationship to his wife Selena, he finds it can still be rekindled. Sam isn’t exercised about his wife’s affairs, yet makes surmises about Lily’s. (Spotting that Sam Quaid rhymes with Sam Spade, I wondered about him playing detective like Dashiell Hammett’s detective.)

Lily’s husband Hal is patient with the ups and downs of his wife’s heady passion for Sam and there are whole chapters on the reactions of their friends. Lily consults Lucasta, whose husband has left her for an older woman. “Quite the livewire…He’ll come back… He’s done it before”, opines a world weary Lucasta.

That the novel’s title is a statement, not a question, makes it immediately, powerfully decisive, and seems to suggest that, despite everything, relationships last, and continue evolving in all their complexity until, and possibly beyond, the end of life. But it’s worth noting that Jacobson is quoting Philip Larkin’s Arundel Tomb, a poem about surveying a couple in death: “what will survive of us is love”, a sentiment Larkin concludes to be only “almost true”.

By Judi Herman

What Will Survive of Us by Howard Jacobson is out now (Jonathan Cape, £20). penguin.co.uk