3 voices just don’t add up

ONE of the greatest pleasures in encountering new novelists is to watch them find their own particular style. In her first novel, “The Mathematics of Love,” Emma Darwin, a great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, tries out three distinct voices in the first-person narration. The one we hear least of is the one from 2006; the one from 1819 makes up the majority of the book. But the one that stays with you, the authentic voice of a natural writer with a distinct talent for fiction, is that from 1976.

There are period details from that year -- the Israeli raid on Entebbe, violence in Northern Ireland, the terrible summer drought and heat wave that wracked England -- but this is not what makes the writing so special. Although that year is more than three decades away from us, in the world of this novel, it is the true present, with a sense of immediacy that leaps off the page. The author would have been a mere 12 years old then. Her protagonist in these sections, Anna Ware, is 15. Anna is a marvelous creation, a sort of everygirl, with no particular virtues or faults but always compelling and believable. Her emotional credibility is evident no matter how trivial-seeming her subject in the voice Darwin has found for her:

“I rolled onto my back. The pearls of bathwater had dried on me, and it was incredibly quiet. It wasn’t evening quite -- I hadn’t slept that long -- but the patches of sunlight on the floor had stretched and yellowed like a favorite old T-shirt spread on the washing line, and the light was filling the air so that it was like opening your eyes under golden water. Then downstairs I heard a crash and a voice shouting, then another crash. I felt suddenly cold and bare, like when the last of the bathwater goes, making that scraping noise in its hurry to get away, and all that’s left is the sides of the empty bath, just breathing the warm ghost of what’s gone.”

The 1976 sections of “The Mathematics of Love” are Anna’s domain -- her story -- but the characters who surround her are also so wonderfully rendered that the reader can smell and feel them: the ne’er-do-well uncle; the harsh, bitter old grandmother; the refugee photographer who fascinates Anna; and, most of all, the pathetic little waif Cecil, so beautifully rendered he almost seems Dickensian. Yet, archetypal though they are, never do they seem rote.

Would that you could say the same for the 1819 sections, which are rendered in an artificial style that makes them seem like nothing so much as a very creaky old costume drama. Although most of the action from the 19th and 20th centuries takes place in the same place, Kersey Hall, a former school that used to be a private estate, and there are little things that connect them, they could not be more different. Darwin is an admirer of such writers as Rose Tremain and A.S. Byatt, but unfortunately she lacks their flair for re-imagining the distant past. Darwin’s prose stiffens as she travels back in time, insights become hackneyed, points are labored. She seems to try too hard and in so doing loses sight of her particular gift for deeply felt observation.

“The Mathematics of Love” was written as part of the master’s program in writing at Britain’s University of Glamorgan, and Darwin is currently writing a new historical novel for her doctorate. So it would seem that this is another case of what the institutionalization of creative writing has wrought. How else do you explain a talented writer with a capacity for natural-seeming prose wrapping herself up in such postured, mannered writing? The cliche of writing about what you know springs to mind, but apparently that is not fashionable in the academic groves of creative writing programs. Darwin may have a genuine love of the historical, but it does not come through in her writing. Let us hope that bad tutelage will not succeed in diverting this talented writer from the subjects she was born to explore. And who better than a Darwin to know that she should stick with her natural selections?

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Martin Rubin is a critic and the author of “Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life.”