Ranging from back-breaking days of gathering sea coal to long nights of gigging pubs in the 1980s north of England, Paddy Crewe’s gritty and engrossing sophomore novel follows the destinies of two very different but equally well realised protagonists: Keely is a compulsive reader seeking to leave behind an impoverished childhood marked by tragedy and loss; Finn is an introvert taking uneasy strides towards a future of human connection. Together they may just complete each other.
The story of their connection is braided out of three distinct strands. The first follows Keely, sketching out her childhood in a coastal encampment where she lives with her distant father and, later, her descent into alcohol-saturated early adulthood.
The second focuses on Finn, bullied and ostracised in school but who, to the shock of no one more than himself, goes on to flourish as the frontman of a promising local band. Neither encounters the other for a surprisingly long time, and it is this decision, with counterintuitive brilliance, that elevates True Love above standard boy-meets-girl fare.
Other writers might have been less willing to hold off their central relationship for such a long stretch, but Crewe’s gambit allows us to truly know Keely and Finn as three-dimensional individuals before bringing them together in “a flurry of opaque, arrow-headed feelings”. It is a startling moment when the characters we have observed so closely throughout the abortive escapes of their formative years suddenly “feel euphoric, liberated, gifted a command over their own lives that seems suddenly absurd they were ever without”.
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Yet while the author does not spare the fireworks, True Love is (despite its title) unbeholden to sentimentality. It is far too raw for that. Crewe, a Middlesbrough native, renders the bleak towns along the North Sea coast in blocky, hard-nosed fashion. These are cold, grey, windswept places in times of economic hardship. Joy is found in charity shop bookshelves, raucous nights out or, in the case of Finn and his bandmates, by wrestling their experiences of the world into song (indeed, here Crewe offers a beautiful account of the creative process with some of the best sequences in the novel).
It is, at its core, a story about what makes ordinary lives sublime.
