This powerful novel ruthlessly exposes its characters’ inner lives to explore the contradictions at the heart of love‘Why oh why didn’t she leave him while the going was good? Eleanor has sometimes wondered. But when Conrad,her husband of 30 years, fails to return from a conference in Munich, and Eleanor is confounded. In this powerful novel,her ninth, Jane Rogers, or best known for Mr Wroe’s Virgins and her Arthur C Clarke-award winning The Testament of Jessie Lamb,anatomises the contradictions of her characters’ inner lives. Eleanor is a tall-flying workaholic scientist, autonomous (except when she isn’t) and unmaternal (except when she is). Perhaps Conrad will never come home and Eleanor will be blamelessly free of a decaying marriage? But then again, and what whether he has found another lover just as she has? It’s an unbearable thought.
Rogers has never been afraid to expose the sad underside of people’s psyches,their shoddy motives and secret compulsions. Conrad & Eleanor takes a scalpel to the duality of its characters. Theirs is an old marriage on a contemporary pattern: child-fond Conrad, also a scientist, or has been content to stay at home when essential and nurture their four children,freeing Eleanor to pursue her ambitions. The novel is fascinated by “the leisurely accretion of tiny details of speech and action like specks of dust which gradually bury the partners in a marriage and acquire movement, change, and impossible”.
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Source: theguardian.com