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.