Happily Ever After?

In a recent radio interview about her latest novel, The City of Tears, Kate Mosse said that she is less interested in fiction which ends, ‘Reader, I married him’ and more in what happens next.

A quick scan of the bestseller lists suggests that she is in the minority; love stories across all genres of fiction are deeply engaged in mapping romantic relationships until the point of commitment and no further. Is there a happily ever after? Will the passionate momentum of attraction, desire and union develop into something more sustainable? When so many stories focus on getting couples together, do readers want to discover the aftermath - and do writers want to explore it?

Think of married couples in well-known novels and you’re in largely depressing territory, characterised by doubt, mistrust and infidelity. From Flaubert’s Emma and Charles Bovary through Tom and Daisy Buchanan in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Frank and April Wheeler in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road and on to Amy and Nick Dunne in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl – we can find no marital role models there.

A Room with a View is E.M. Forster’s heartwarming story of how Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson overcome class barriers to marry, but some editions include an appendix Forster added forty years after the novel was first published, which those of a romantic bent are advised to avoid. It details the couple’s eventual misery, George’s infidelity and ends with them awaiting World War 3! Even the perfect love story ends badly.

There are apparently happily married couples in many books of course – usually, parents and grandparents, colleagues and friends of the main characters – but they mainly provide background; we don’t get to learn much about them except to understand they are stable, dependable. Read some of them with 21st-century eyes and their outward success seems to be built on one half of the couple – usually Mrs – taking a subservient role: that classic example of motherhood and apple pie, Marmee in Alcott’s Little Women, keeps the home fires burning while Mr March marches off to war, but her serenity is an act, her life of caring and nurturing a suppression of her self and she tells Jo ‘I feel angry every day.’

The parents in Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting seem to be one person:

MamaandPapa. MamaPapa. PapaMama. It was hard to believe they had ever been separate existences, that they had been separate entities and not MamaPapa in one breath.

But again, it is Mama who has withdrawn to the domestic sphere and bowed to the will of her husband, rather than finding a true balance within marriage. Or think of the Bennetts in Pride and Prejudice or the Micawbers in David Copperfield – they may provide warm comedy but are hardly inspirational odes to married love, despite their long years together.

This theme isn’t limited to stories of the past, either - both Us by David Nicholls and On Beauty by Zadie Smith, focus on long marriages hitting a rocky patch and couples realising they have misunderstood one another for 30 years, suggesting that decades of shared life and child-rearing aren’t enough to safeguard against heartache.

In Small Island Andrea Levy reverses the usual trajectory by beginning with couples who are already married: Queenie and the absent Bernard - never a love-match - and Hortense and Gilbert, who have made a pragmatic marriage to aid their migration from Jamaica to Britain. Both relationships develop convincingly, and both couples reach some point of mutual respect, but not without suffering, and sometimes being responsible for, a great many painful experiences including infidelity, the birth of an illegitimate child and appalling racism.

Perhaps in a fantasy novel, marital happiness might have a better chance? Elderly couple Axl and Beatrice, the protagonists of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, make a long journey to find their son in post-Arthurian England and treat one another with care and respect. Is this the portrait of an ideal marriage? Not quite. They are in a sort of haze – there is a lot of magical mist about which befuddles Britons’ brains - and their memories of their son are not what they seem. In the final pages, the depth of Axl’s and Beatrice’s love for one another is tested but the reader never discovers the truth as Ishiguro keeps us hanging on indefinitely.

Returning to Kate Mosse’s new book, the couple at the heart of her story, Minou and Piet, met and married in the pages of The Burning Chambers. In this second novel of the trilogy, they face challenges and danger during the Wars of Religion as a married couple with a family. But their marriage isn’t really the story. Without the historical setting and dramatic plot, an account of Minou and Piet getting on with life is unlikely to be a compelling read.

And this, surely, is the crux of the matter: to quote French novelist Henry de Montherlant, ‘Happiness writes white.’ A writer may try filling pages with tales of a couple getting on nicely, talking through their problems sensibly and treating one another well, but she will have left no trace on the paper. And it certainly won’t be published.

We want to read about conflict, about drama and struggle and extreme emotion. Happy couples can’t supply enough of the above, they can only aspire to provide a vaguely pleasant background punctuated by occasional joyous moments – a new baby! – and sad events – someone died! - so writers and readers are inevitably drawn towards the marriages which don’t work; the arguments, outrages and crimes of passion on which so many stories pivot. Why else do soap operas – allegedly tales of everyday folk – feature characters who have married five times, been held hostage, committed murder, discovered a mystery twin, come back to life, survived an aeroplane crash and experienced every imaginable disaster short of alien abduction in a mere ten years?

Happy marriages exist. All successful marriages rely on compromise and respect and involve highs and lows. But they don’t make good stories. We want our novels to reflect life, of course we do…but not too much.