The Romantic By Barbara Gowdy

Why drag Rimbaud into it?

This novel, which has just been longlisted for the Booker prize, is about the loves that come and go in youth and that we spend the rest of our lives trying to recover or recover from.

Holding the story together are the loves of Louise Kirk, the narrator, whose life we follow - partly in flashback - from the moment her mother leaves her father and disappears. Louise falls first for Mrs Richter, who moves into her Toronto neighbourhood a year later, in 1960: "I know how unlikely that sounds, a 10-year-old girl falling in love at all, let alone with a middle-aged woman. But to say I become infatuated doesn't describe the gravity and voluptuousness of my feelings."

Gowdy captures perfectly the sense of inquisitive wonder and the skewed whimsy of the pre-adolescent world. There is a symbiotic relationship between content and tone at the heart of this novel. The loves of which Gowdy writes are never quite there, they are not clearly defined. Her prose is characterised by imprecision. Not in the construction of the individual sentences, but in the miasmic effect that these sentences create.

There are diversions along the way of course, conceptual questions which encourage the reader to engage with the writer in a less fervid place. The central narrative dynamic of the novel is Louise's doomed relationship with the Richter's adopted son, Abel. Abel is a precociously gifted pianist. When he moves away from Louise he sends her poetry, including a transcription of Rimbaud's poem "Romance". Abel sees the good in everyone and believes that "everything is perfect." When we first encounter him, he has already drunk himself to death. So, is he the romantic of the title? He meets most of the criteria. He also has form, in the shape of an adolescent essay entitled "Oblivion" which mirrors the intellectual incoherence of Romanticism (and is, accurately enough for a piece of purple-walled "philosophy", unreadable). Or is the "romantic" Louise? At times this looks a safe bet. She can certainly waft with the best of them.

What is the significance of Rimbaud? His "systematic disordering of the senses" finds echoes in Abel's mindset, but nothing more. Gowdy is playing an intriguing game in the invocation of the poet's power. He is notoriously difficult to translate and known for the novelty and freshness of his language. Gowdy's prose, by contrast, is simple.

But it all works. And how. We read novels for the liberation of release or the comfort of recognition or the challenge of reason. Occasionally we stumble on a work that provides all three. This is one such novel and it is, in its own atmospheric way, a very beautiful and truthful book.