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A review by incrediblemelk
The Amateur Science of Love by Craig Sherborne
3.0
Basically, if you've read Sherborne's Monthly essay about the actual people on whom this autobiographical novel is based, you've read the novel. Most of this is padding, and the essay was more clear-eyed about the author's agenda.
At the moment I find Australian novels set in 'the bush' to be quite unappealing, though I've enjoyed them in the past. (I realise that this makes me a 'bad Australian reader'.) I wouldn't have read this except it was a book club book. I enjoyed the narrative conceit that the protagonist is writing the narrative as the events he narrates are unfolding, hiding his manuscript from the partner he so callously excoriates. I liked the evocative descriptions of how panoptical and tribal a country town can be, and I can even appreciate the way the central couple Colin and Tilda co-dependently taunt and punish one another. It reminded me of a cross between Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the final scene of Death Becomes Her, where two former mortal enemies are bound to an eternity of each other's company.
But I found the prevailing tone of cringey self-justification really unpleasant. This might be an effect Sherborne deliberately wants to create – the conjuring of an unpleasant, self-justifying protagonist – except he'd already written about these events, and about the impossibility of forgiveness, in the context of memoir. So I feel as if this is a craven character assassination of a dead woman who can't combat Sherborne's version of events.
At the moment I find Australian novels set in 'the bush' to be quite unappealing, though I've enjoyed them in the past. (I realise that this makes me a 'bad Australian reader'.) I wouldn't have read this except it was a book club book. I enjoyed the narrative conceit that the protagonist is writing the narrative as the events he narrates are unfolding, hiding his manuscript from the partner he so callously excoriates. I liked the evocative descriptions of how panoptical and tribal a country town can be, and I can even appreciate the way the central couple Colin and Tilda co-dependently taunt and punish one another. It reminded me of a cross between Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the final scene of Death Becomes Her, where two former mortal enemies are bound to an eternity of each other's company.
But I found the prevailing tone of cringey self-justification really unpleasant. This might be an effect Sherborne deliberately wants to create – the conjuring of an unpleasant, self-justifying protagonist – except he'd already written about these events, and about the impossibility of forgiveness, in the context of memoir. So I feel as if this is a craven character assassination of a dead woman who can't combat Sherborne's version of events.