A Long Way from Verona

I first attempted to read Jane Gardam’s A Long Way from Verona a decade ago. A family member of mine recommended it longer ago than that. I originally gave up a third of the way through. Reading it again, I could see exactly where I had stopped and why. However, I kept going this time, and was rewarded with one of the funniest romances I have ever read.

The title has at least two meanings - probably more than that - but one of them is that we are not exactly dealing with Romeo and Juliet. The young lovers here are mismatched and delusional in a comical way, and the spell is so brief it is as if they wandered into an enchanted wood and out again, wondering what happened to them. Real life also intrudes in an immediate way, with all its clarifying power, in the form of an air raid.

The story takes place in the north of England, in the middle of the war. One of the best and truest things about it is the way wartime details are woven through the narrative, without overtaking it. The viewpoint character, Jessica Vye, is more concerned with her friendships, and the unfairness of her teachers, and possibilities for romance and adventure—or just doing something different to end the monotony of her days—than she is with the war. Her thoughts are presented in a wholly convincing way. You really do get the sense of Jessica’s interiority, and the fullness of her observations, to the point of unpleasantness. She often captures the way other people are unbearable, or how we can be unbearable to ourselves. Her great fear is that her best friend secretly hates her.

The rawness of some of these observations made the story hard for me to read, the first time around. It was as if the setting for closeness to the action was too high—as if I were observing it from the front row of the movie theater, the characters coming off as distorted from proximity. Similarly, I found some of the descriptions of people and places almost too precise. As if certain details, instead of creating a sense of the universal, just brought me an overly clear picture of this one town in the north of England, circa 1941, and nothing else.

The saving grace of the narrative is the way this uncomfortable, truth-telling, closely-observed style treats the budding romance between Jessica and the son of her parents’ friends, Christian. The absurdity of the accumulation of details is so rich and so delicious that it swirled the rest of the story around it, giving the whole thing structure and purpose.

I don’t know if A Long Way from Verona counts as a YA book, or if it is more of a literary account of adolescence. It was written in 1971, when there was more fluidity about this distinction. The genre was less separate or codified, at the time. The immediacy of the voice would tend to appeal to younger readers, but the fierce satire of young love propels it toward an older, more jaded sensibility. This ambiguity is among its great charms.