A martyr without a cause

‘Yes, you may well sigh and beat your head on the table,’ the narrator-protagonist of Love Songs and Lies addresses the reader on page 115, but if you’re going to allow Libby Purves’s heroine to get to you this early in the book you’ll be in a bad way by the end. There is a long and melancholy tradition of self-sacrificial heroines to which she all too knowingly belongs, but when it comes to an irritating combination of self-abnegation and sheer wrong-headedness there is not a Fanny Price or Agnes Copperfield in the whole of fiction who could hold a candle to Libby Purves’s Sally Bellinger.

The daughter of an East Anglian vicar, Sally is up at Oxford in the 1970s reading English and sharing a damp house on the canal with sparky Marienka, stolid Yorkshire Kate and an improbably suave graduate art historian called Max. Through a cold and mouldy winter the foursome play house in Oxford, and while Marienka flits from affair to affair and Kate does whatever it is that geographers do, Sally drags out her finals year Martha-ing over their claustrophobic little community and mooning after the unresponsive Max while he satisfies his cold-fish appetites elsewhere. The fraught atmosphere of the household is further strained when Max’s druggy rock-musician younger brother Marty joins the gang, and provides the ever willing Sally with more opportunities for self-denial. Oxford is followed by London and life predictably goes from bad to worse. Pregnant by one man, married to another, besieged on all sides by death, betrayal and more death, Sally can still be relied on to find fresh ways of humiliating herself as she answers the call for help from Max’s rich, sophisticated family. Lumpen, broke and undistinguished, as she describes herself, she relishes the power their need delivers and the leverage it gives her over the increasingly ghastly Max, the love of her life.