I got Love Notes From Freddie (2015) as a review copy, based on how much I’d enjoyed her novels The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets and The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp, so I don’t know why it took me quite so long to get to it. In fact, I did give it a go a couple of years ago and wasn’t in the right mood – but Project Names made me get it off the shelf again.
I suppose I should start by saying that I was under Miss Crewe’s spell from the moment she walked into the room, picked up a piece of chalk and scratched an isosceles triangle on the blackboard. She had that effect on people – made all the more remarkable by her absolute blindness to her own power.
Reading it this time, I can see why it was a tougher sell than the others. It starts off in a school in the late 1960s, and you get the feeling that it might all be about detentions and stern headmistresses and that sort of thing. Marnie Fitzpatrick is the focus – a goodie two-shoes who is excellent at maths and impresses her teacher Miss Crewe. But perhaps she doesn’t want to stay well-behaved and predictable all the time – one of the reasons that she gets drunk with her friend Rachel. But during school hours and in school uniform – and so she and Rachel are expelled. Marnie is off to a different school that doesn’t have the inspirational Miss Crewe.
The chapters are alternatively from the perspectives of Marnie and Miss Crewe – we learn that the latter was an excellent dancer in her youth, but an injury (and her natural brilliance at mathematics) led to a teaching career.
They’re both interesting characters, but I didn’t find the initial set-up particularly interesting. Thankfully, though, it is just a background to what follows. And what follows is (finally!) Freddie. The novel certainly gets a new lease of life when he arrives, and we breathe a sigh of relief that the novel won’t be about a maths prodigy’s education. (Unless you wanted to read that sort of novel, I suppose, then you’ll be disappointed – but it didn’t seem quite to fit.) Marnie comes across Freddie at the local factory, where he works as an electrician. But he also uses the space to dance. Marnie sees him at it, and decides to volunteer her old maths teacher as a possible dance teacher. Diffidently, Freddie agrees.
Describing dancing is a difficult task, but Rice manages to convey the freedom Freddie feels when he can dance – along with the uncertainty, the self-criticism, and the insecurity – all from the perspective of somebody watching the dance, because we never hear from Freddie himself. And the perspectives of Marnie and Miss Crewe, watching him dance in different chapters, are cleverly different. Marnie sees him with the adoring eyes of a girl falling in love for the first time. Miss Crewe sees him with more world-weariness – superimposing her own failed dancing career, and the short-lived romance from the same period.
From here, Rice’s excellent storytelling ability takes us through to the end of the novel. It was a slower start than the other two I’ve read, but perhaps a deeper emotional centre once we’ve got going. There is a joy to the novel, but it is offset with greater uncertainty. Marnie’s naivety clashes with Miss Crewe’s hard-lost hope, and Freddie is somewhere between the two. Rice is very good at young love and the exuberant anxiety of it – and she’s equally good at reining the novel in to something more nuanced and cautious than a straightforward romance.
So, if you give this one a go, power through the maths at the beginning and get to something with Rice’s special touch. Or loiter in the maths and the school scenes, if that’s your jam.
