This book, by Melvyn Bragg, took me a long time to read. It was a bit of a challenge. I freely admit to liking stories with a bit of pace, stories that move forward. This one is slow and very wordy. Melvyn can find 6 ways of saying the same thing - beautiful ways, it's true, lovingly crafted sentences that roll sensuously across the page - but which left me thirsting for something to get hold of. Nor could I find any sympathy for either of the two main characters in the saga. Still, in that sense they were, I suppose, very real. Very few of us are the neat characters we often find in most contemporary novels, after all.
Natasha and Joseph meet in Oxford. From different backgrounds, different nations and with different aspirations they have nothing in common but, thanks to Joe's persistence, they become a couple, marry and have a daughter. Eventually their respective pasts overwhelm them with tragic results. The narrative is told in the form of Joe's letter to his grown up daughter, written when he is an elderly man, and in the present tense during their courtship and marriage. It's introspective, thoughtful and slow paced. Literary in style, with language that caresses and fills the mind with pastel colours, it's also overblown, overdone and pretentious.
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