Purposes of Love by Mary Renault
Oct. 21st, 2025 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeI am not going to read another one of the historicals next, said I; I'm going to read this one, even if it's absolutely terrible. Well, it's not absolutely terrible; I don't know that I'd call it good, exactly, or bad, exactly, but it's certainly an experience of a book. Was I expecting anything else at this point? No, not really. Have some thoughts.
Purposes of Love (1939) was Renault's first novel, and I had vaguely osmosed that it was another kind of weird het romance along the lines of Return to Night; it is that—a very basic summary would say that it's about the developing relationship between Vivian and Mic, respectively a nurse and a pathologist working at the same hospital—but it surprised me by being a good deal more explicitly queer than RtN is. One of the side characters, Colonna Kimball (what a name) is a lesbian; early in the book Vivian has a rather half-hearted but definitely textual affair with her, and after that's over Colonna gets together with another of the nurses and goes through her own side romantic drama. Meanwhile Vivian has moved on to her main love interest, Mic; they meet through Vivian's brother Jan, and it is not only absolutely textual but fairly majorly important to their relationship and Mic's character throughout the book that Mic a) has been pretty much exclusively attracted to men until Vivian and b) falls in love with her largely because of her resemblance to Jan. So that was fun!
(I spent some time during the early part of the book wavering over whether Mic should be pronounced like Mick or like Mike; went with the former, on the grounds that the latter really only makes sense if you're thinking of mic as in microphone; then wondered why 'Mic and Vivian' sounded vaguely phonetically familiar as a paired set of names, and realised I was thinking of Rick and Vyvyan from The Young Ones, who would surely make a more sensible and stable couple than most people in a Renault novel; so there's an irrelevant digression for you.)
The developing romance is... well, it's all very beautifully written, at once vivid and elliptical in the way Renault is (I surely missed things, though there were a few points where I think I managed to infer more than she actually meant—I had some confusion over whether the phrase 'making love' has its modern meaning yet in 1939, and concluded that it doesn't, though it does seem to have become stronger than its nineteenth-century sense). It's perhaps not enough to sustain the three hundred pages that the book gets through before the ending starts going, and I found it got rather tedious and overwrought after a while. I thought both main characters were not always very sympathetic, not to say rather silly, in how they treat each other and in the decisions they make. There is throughout a sense of desperation, high-stakes urgency and overwhelming tiredness which I get the sense Renault likes as context for her characters and relationships, and which is perhaps better sustained by a wartime or classical Greek setting—though the all-consuming exhaustion of Vivian's work as a nurse certainly does something for it.
Which gives me a nice segue into what was possibly my favourite aspect of the book, the hospital setting and the nurses' work and world. As with the less central hospital in Return to Night Renault is writing about things she knows well, and I found all the detail—the strict regime of rules the nurses live under, their uniforms, how scheduling and shifts work, services in the hospital chapel, the terribly important hierarchy, the gossip, etc. etc., not to mention the actual medical aspects—fascinating. At one point Vivian realises she is (probably—there is just some plausible deniability, which I suppose may have made it more publishable) pregnant, and that's how I learnt that ergot, the fungal parasite of rye that caused so many problems for medieval peasants, is also an abortifacient. That was fascinating too, and I was slightly surprised that the subject could be written about so openly.
Well, and then there's the ending. The ending takes up the last eighty pages or so and I really don't know what to say about it; it is at least a total disastrous swerve in a rather different way from the endings of the other three Renault contemporaries I've read. There is certainly some powerful writing in there, and I'm afraid parts of it will stay with me. Does it work, though?
The final page or so, once all the plot is wrapped up, is essentially a manifesto from Vivian's POV of Renault's view of relationships. Mic and Vivian end the book together but it's not at all a happy thing; love is a battle to be lost, an all-consuming force in which one loses one's self, and in which there is no equality or real understanding; and—having now read seven of her books over ten years and feeling far less young and naive a reader than I was when I started—all I can say about it is: yeah, Mary, I think I'd kind of got that by now.
Colonna, by the way, does not get a happy ending; her new nurse girlfriend leaves her for a man, just like Vivian did and just like she's now convinced everyone will always and she'll inevitably end up alone. It is terribly 'publishable 1930s lesbian', without even the sheer bizarreness of The Friendly Young Ladies to recommend it, and I want to give her a hug and some happiness.
Purposes of Love (1939) was Renault's first novel, and I had vaguely osmosed that it was another kind of weird het romance along the lines of Return to Night; it is that—a very basic summary would say that it's about the developing relationship between Vivian and Mic, respectively a nurse and a pathologist working at the same hospital—but it surprised me by being a good deal more explicitly queer than RtN is. One of the side characters, Colonna Kimball (what a name) is a lesbian; early in the book Vivian has a rather half-hearted but definitely textual affair with her, and after that's over Colonna gets together with another of the nurses and goes through her own side romantic drama. Meanwhile Vivian has moved on to her main love interest, Mic; they meet through Vivian's brother Jan, and it is not only absolutely textual but fairly majorly important to their relationship and Mic's character throughout the book that Mic a) has been pretty much exclusively attracted to men until Vivian and b) falls in love with her largely because of her resemblance to Jan. So that was fun!
(I spent some time during the early part of the book wavering over whether Mic should be pronounced like Mick or like Mike; went with the former, on the grounds that the latter really only makes sense if you're thinking of mic as in microphone; then wondered why 'Mic and Vivian' sounded vaguely phonetically familiar as a paired set of names, and realised I was thinking of Rick and Vyvyan from The Young Ones, who would surely make a more sensible and stable couple than most people in a Renault novel; so there's an irrelevant digression for you.)
The developing romance is... well, it's all very beautifully written, at once vivid and elliptical in the way Renault is (I surely missed things, though there were a few points where I think I managed to infer more than she actually meant—I had some confusion over whether the phrase 'making love' has its modern meaning yet in 1939, and concluded that it doesn't, though it does seem to have become stronger than its nineteenth-century sense). It's perhaps not enough to sustain the three hundred pages that the book gets through before the ending starts going, and I found it got rather tedious and overwrought after a while. I thought both main characters were not always very sympathetic, not to say rather silly, in how they treat each other and in the decisions they make. There is throughout a sense of desperation, high-stakes urgency and overwhelming tiredness which I get the sense Renault likes as context for her characters and relationships, and which is perhaps better sustained by a wartime or classical Greek setting—though the all-consuming exhaustion of Vivian's work as a nurse certainly does something for it.
Which gives me a nice segue into what was possibly my favourite aspect of the book, the hospital setting and the nurses' work and world. As with the less central hospital in Return to Night Renault is writing about things she knows well, and I found all the detail—the strict regime of rules the nurses live under, their uniforms, how scheduling and shifts work, services in the hospital chapel, the terribly important hierarchy, the gossip, etc. etc., not to mention the actual medical aspects—fascinating. At one point Vivian realises she is (probably—there is just some plausible deniability, which I suppose may have made it more publishable) pregnant, and that's how I learnt that ergot, the fungal parasite of rye that caused so many problems for medieval peasants, is also an abortifacient. That was fascinating too, and I was slightly surprised that the subject could be written about so openly.
Well, and then there's the ending. The ending takes up the last eighty pages or so and I really don't know what to say about it; it is at least a total disastrous swerve in a rather different way from the endings of the other three Renault contemporaries I've read. There is certainly some powerful writing in there, and I'm afraid parts of it will stay with me. Does it work, though?
The final page or so, once all the plot is wrapped up, is essentially a manifesto from Vivian's POV of Renault's view of relationships. Mic and Vivian end the book together but it's not at all a happy thing; love is a battle to be lost, an all-consuming force in which one loses one's self, and in which there is no equality or real understanding; and—having now read seven of her books over ten years and feeling far less young and naive a reader than I was when I started—all I can say about it is: yeah, Mary, I think I'd kind of got that by now.
Colonna, by the way, does not get a happy ending; her new nurse girlfriend leaves her for a man, just like Vivian did and just like she's now convinced everyone will always and she'll inevitably end up alone. It is terribly 'publishable 1930s lesbian', without even the sheer bizarreness of The Friendly Young Ladies to recommend it, and I want to give her a hug and some happiness.
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