Love is Blind

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He now carries the Russian fire inside him, and the confrontations are as powerful, as emotional as his time in exile. The doctor recommends that Brodie Moncur leaves Paris for a sunnier, drier climate and that he avoids emotional turmoil, if possible. She knows she is never going to make it big time as an opera singer – not just because of her height, she is aware her voice is not big enough. I’d lived the life of these characters and at the end of both books I experienced a tearful moment when I reached the final page.

The language isn’t always convincing and there are some rather clunky references to contemporary events and so on. The novel is deliciously, compulsively readable-what a treat to relax into the words of a skilled storyteller. My point here isn’t to chart the extent of Love is Blind’s Chekhovian overlay but just to reflect on what the internet adds – and takes away from – reading fiction.

Set at the turn of the 19th century, it is a period piece drawing the life of a Scot, Brodie Moncur. You really get to know and believe in his characters, envisage the places they visit, and in this period piece, feel you are in the late 19th/early 20th Century. And when, one day, a gun – a small “muff-pistol” – accidentally drops out of her handbag, it’s hard not to think of Chekhov’s famous literary maxim, that “one must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off”.

It’s a finely judged performance: a deft and resonant alchemy of fact and fiction, of literary myth and imagination.It wasn’t helped by a somewhat melodramatic feel and in the end I was quite glad to finish the book, whose emotional climax didn’t affect me in the slightest, I’m afraid, because it felt contrived and overdone. In the past, he has sometimes been intrigued by larger issues, like the mutability of identity and the helplessness of individuals confronted with — and subsumed by — the great processes of history.