Social distancing has us 1.5 meters apart for physical health and safety.
In Felicity Volk’s DESIRE LINES, two lovers cannot exceed 8.26 meters separation before their physical and emotional health is put at risk.
Seven years on from LIGHTNING, her accomplished debut novel, Volk has produced a sweeping romantic saga that sprawls across sixty years, a scar tissued romance between Evie and Paddy.
DESIRE LINES takes its title from French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s contemporaneous treatise on the philosophy of architecture, the poetics of space where he postulated the notion of chemins de desir, desire paths, the paths one chose rather than the paths laid out.
Evie’s path was supposed to be the law, but she chose a garden path instead, becoming a landscape architect, a path that brings her back into the orbit of Paddy, her first love, and an enduring passion.
Paddy was always going to be an architect, a law to himself, but imprisoned by painful memories and fragile truths.
From the arresting opening line, “Are you still a liar?” to the final chapter over four hundred pages later, DESIRE LINES is a lush jungle, a wild forest, perennial, prolific and flourishing.
We are the architects of our own design, and so our faults are not in our stars but in ourselves. Separated by time and space, Evie and Paddy’s lives take expected paths that seem laid out by society – marriage and family. But their mutual desire for each other is never extinguished, merely laying dormant till circumstance provides a reunion and a rekindling.
The inconvenient truth is that fundamental lie was mixed into the relationship’s foundation, and fibbing is fabricated into Paddy’s fibre.
Truth is at the heart of DESIRE LINES, it’s absence, its concealment, its inconvenience, painful for the way it took an apparently solid thing and exposed it as a facade.
“It always found the load bearing wall in the structure of a person or an institution or a set of beliefs. And so in Paddy’s experience, it was the last tool to be employed when a fix was required.”
Plastering over cracks and a light plane is the preferred course of Paddy’s struggle with his unrelenting passion for Evie and his sense of duty to his wife and children, a troubled conscience on life support.
Evie is far more honest, eventually, in her declaration of her passion for Paddy, to the detriment of her marriage and family. He can only wonder at her willingness to to put up with the lies he told his wife to be able to keep a lover and the truths he withheld from Evie so he could hold onto his family. A place of wilful darkness.
Volk tends this jungle of emotions with precise, particular care – pruning, pollarding, coppicing -precise in its perception of people and place, revelatory in the power of story in our lives and the supremacy of desire over personal morals.
A riveting tale about compulsive, compelling love told with a generous heart, a novel hard to bid farewell to.
DESIRE LINES by Felicity Volk is published by Hachette Australia.
