SHRINK-RAPT PASSION

THIS is such a clever first book that it reads like a first book about first books. Jonathan Bate has been, until now, a strictly non- fiction Shakespeare and Romantics scholar and literary journalist. He unfashionably believes that the reading of great works from the past is good for you. The Cure For Love teaches us the same tag, but this time it's seriously dressed up in a real love story and beadily self- reflexive writing.

The story line holds no real surprises. An amnesiac is discovered wandering the wastes of Scotland. We meet him first through a psychotherapist's eyes as she (Laura) attempts a cure to recover his identity. Bate gives us a good deal of information about transference and counter-transference, and this looks like working as a good model for reading books too. The patient William, though, is not really suffering from amnesia at all, but is a storyteller, a literary journalist and essayist like Bate, who begins, uncannily, to tell "his" story like a novelist writing his first book.

The story he tells is a rewrite of Liber Amoris, William Hazlitt's narrative of his catastrophic affair with the daughter of his lodgings keeper, Sarah Walker. Hazlitt painfully discovers that he wasn't the only lodger to be granted sexual favours. I'm giving the end away here, but then I think Bate condescends rather in assuming so breezily that no one reads Hazlitt any more. It becomes increasingly difficult to believe that Laura could be that gullible. This caveat apart, the mimicking of Hazlitt's style is well done. The erotic writing is brave and alive. And the whole argument that reading may lodge experiences in our heads that become important, personal memories is moving, despite the irritating self- reflexivity. The Liber Amoris rewrite is too long, since I began to regret the sexy tension of having Laura's psychotherapeutic eyes sifting through William's stories. But the depiction of the elusive, maddeningly sexploitative Sarah Walker figure is beguiling, to say the least. The Cure For Love argues that writing-and-reading cures are better healers of love-damaged minds than traditional Freudian talking cures. They help us fictionalise our own life stories. A writer of a first book is in need of such a cure to get over the first amnesiac block. But this may apply to all book lovers. The moral of this tale, dear readers, is please reread Hazlitt's Liber Amoris.

Copyright 1998
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