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Book review: Cuts like a knife

Few stories invoke as much hope - and heartbreak - as Sadie Jones' romantic masterpiece Fallout

Even the most eternal of optimists may, upon completing Sadie Jones' fourth novel Fallout, begin to liken love to a hurricane that wrecks everything in its path, considering the extent of emotional devastation experienced by the novel's central characters. 
Getting straight to the story, it's the early seventies and Lucasz Kanowski - Luke - decides to swap life in a provincial town for the bright lights of London, with no concrete plan, only a strong desire to escape a painful past. 
The aspiring playwright is portrayed as having no experience or interest in romantic love, only using women as a means of indulging his desires, and forming no lasting bonds with any.
But Jones makes it nearly impossible for us to hate or even dislike Luke, bringing to light in quick succession all his redeeming qualities, from vulnerability and sensitivity to extreme gentleness; from raw honesty to an acute sense of perception. No, he is not your average Mills & Boon cad turned do-gooder, he is someone real, someone who, despite all his flaws, you could actually have fallen for had he crossed your path in reality.
When fragile actress Nina Jacobs enters Luke's life, his overwhelming need to protect her gives way to a first love that is as intense and joyful as it is wounding. For Nina, who has always been ruled, first by an overbearing mother and then a waspish husband, is struggling to disentangle herself from the present and not daring to dream about a future with Luke.
There are times Jones' words can literally make you wince - at both the emotions they evoke and the beauty with which they are strung together are like a series of enchanting fairy lights that induce an inexplicable sense of nostalgia and loss. An example of this is the chapter in which Luke visits his hometown of Seston during Christmas, where encounters with an asylum-bound mother and distant father instantly transport him to a childhood riddled with fears and insecurities.
What sets Fallout apart from many other novels of the genre is, above all else, its sincerity; you begin to believe in the protagonists because Jones goes all out to put her heart and soul into them, breathing life into a narrative that could have turned out forgettable and quite possibly mediocre in less skilled hands.
Neither is the writer prone to lingering too long in one situation, or over one emotion - it is this fleet-footed penning of thoughts and trimming of content that makes Fallout the kind of book you just don't want to put down.
Given that Valentine's Day is just around the corner, Fallout may just resurrect the long-buried cynic in you, but don't toss those carefully picked out cards aside and sing along to Tina Turner's What's Love Got To Do With It just yet. Though laced liberally with sadness and portents of doom (I won't say if Luke and Nina lived unhappily ever after) Fallout should be celebrated as one of the most compelling love stories ever written, with magnificently flawed characters who will stay with you long after the novel has been placed back on the shelf.
Fallout
Sadie Jones
> 405 pages
> Publisher: Vintage Books
> Available at Jashanmal
enid@khaleejtimes.com