Romantic fiction for the unromantic

As Valentine's Day approaches and the adverts for flowers, chocolates, romantic getaways – and even adopt-a-veg – ping into my inbox, my thoughts drift to romance. Okay, I’m lying. In truth, my thoughts recoil from the frill and froth, the commodification of love. I can’t deny that Valentines can be a lot of fun at a certain stage of life or relationship, but grown-up love is too complex to wrap up once a year with a boxed card with a satin padded heart. Or maybe I’m too much of a cynic?

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In my own writing, the dozen or so short stories about couples I’ve published would constitute an unlikely bunch of red roses. Similary, scanning my bookshelves for novels to mark the big day, nothing jumps out at me as pure romance. Pride and Prejudice earns its place as witty social history (or small-scale politics, or even horror, in its depiction of a world where women had no status independent of the men who held the purse strings); its modern counterpart Bridget Jones was consigned to the Oxfam shop before she could bore me with another instalment of her hopeless diet. I’m not against the boy-meets-girl story, but I want a novel to engage my head as well as my heart. So it’s no to romance as genre, and a big maybe to romance as plot.

Yet, looking closer, those romantic subplots keep drawing me in. Perhaps I’ve got a heart after all. Is there a type of novel that particularly benefits from having romance sewn into the weave?

Romance makes the darkness a little lighter

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I blogged recently on the depiction of terror in four literary novels. In each, the gloom and pessimism is partly ameliorated by the love angle, albeit an extremely small element in Pat Barker’s First World War novel, Regeneration. Yet it might be no coincidence that I found this, featuring the minor character (at this stage of the trilogy) Prior’s relationship with a young woman who works in the munitions factory, the bleakest of the four. In contrast, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son can be legitimately described as a love story, despite the possibly more gruesome world of a semi-fictionalised North Korea it depicts. Romance offers a glimmer of hope within the darkness, enabling us to creep a little closer to what might otherwise be unbearable.

Romance renders a speculative setting more credible

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The doomed romance of The Orphan Master’s Son is reminiscent of the story of Winston and Julia in George Orwell’s 1984. Science fiction often necessitates a fair amount of authorial telling; here it is our interest in and identification with the couple that brings the author’s vision of a dystopian futuristic (at the time of writing) Britain to life. But the reverse is also the case: an ordinary romance is enlivened by the novelty of the setting. The same applies to the two novels I mentioned in my recent post on slipstream fiction. Despite their reliance on a somewhat dodgy premise, these novels pose deep questions about who we are. For those willing to believe in a man travelling unpredictably back and forth through time without his clothes on, The Time Traveler’s Wife explores the continuities and discontinuities of the self over time, and closeness and distance in relationships. If we can suspend disbelief to enter a world in which human beings are cloned and harvested for unspecified body parts, the love triangle in Never Let Me Go provides a perspective on the losses that accompany our own journeys to adulthood and how we confront our own mortality. Our sympathy with characters who experience the highs and lows of relationships overrides our scepticism about the created world in which they live.

What do you think?

Where does romance fit in your reading and writing and are there some types of fiction where it matters more than most?

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