Book Review: A Chance for Love

Title: A Chance for Love

(Amazon doesn't have even a computer-generated book image for this vintage novel. Click on the title to order the book directly from Amazon. Here, for Google+ purposes, is a picture of the sort of house shown on the front cover of the book. Real house picture donated to Morguefile by Saffrodite .) 

Author: Iris Bromige

Date: 1947

Publisher: Longmans Green & Co (U.S. edition, Ballantine)

ISBN: none

Length: 217 pages

Quote: “Don't you see, Paul, that any ordinary marriage for me would only be a poor copy of my marriage with David?”

What distinguishes this “Beagle Romance” from similar-size, similar-vintage Harlequins is the number of major characters. The speaker quoted is Frankie, a young war widow. She's talking to Paul, a blind writer with whom she works. Sarah, a young actress, also works with and likes Paul. In order to follow the plot readers also have to remember the names of Lance, Carol, Robert, Clare, Elizabeth, Roger, and Eleanor—nine young single people, four of whom will be married (of course there'll be two separate traditional weddings, this was 1947) at the end of the book.

Personally I find it burdensome enough to keep track of a lot of Bright Young Things' given names in real life where they speak with different voices, but if you enjoy keeping track of a whole social “crowd” and their relationships with one another, you may enjoy following how these characters pair off at the end, who's left alone, and why.

What makes A Chance for Love a breakthrough story selected for reprinting is that Iris Bromige convinced readers that the blind man might be even more attractive than the sighted men in the crowd. He can't see the women, so he's “forced to choose the right heart from the longings of his soul.” The girl who gets Paul is being appreciated for more than her looks. (In fact, for a romance, A Chance for Love is remarkably sparing in physical descriptions; we're told whether the characters—all British—are “dark” or “fair,” “large” or “small,” and that's about as close as Bromige's focus on their faces gets, leading the reader to wonder whether Bromige created a blind romantic hero because her own eyes were giving out.)

In other ways, too, this romance novel was ahead of its genre. Some of the young people who flirt and bicker are thirty-five and forty years old. In the British social hierarchy they all seem to be upper middle class “gentry,” no titles, but they all have jobs. In one of the earlier “date” scenes they all go out as four couples packed into two cars, but before the end of the book couples will be spending time together without chaperones. In some social circles this kind of social behavior was considered extremely, even dangerously, “modern.” It's still a romance, with a lot more chatter about everybody's feelings for each other than interest in their work or their parents or their spirituality or anything of the kind, but Ballantine's editors picked it for reprinting in the 1960s because it seemed more up-to-date than many novels from the 1940s did.

And the setting is still that bucolic, somewhat rose-tinted English Sector of Planet Nice a large reading population had learned to love, where Clare finds Frankie “at the bottom of the garden tying up a climber,” and “She pushed open the shabby white painted gate on which the name of the house was barely legible and walked up the path to the porch...The blackthorn was just beginning to flower,” and Paul “stretched n the grass by Frankie, who was reading him a short poem from the Sunday Times,” and “a steady drizzle was falling for the last mile of their walk...and it was good to see tea laid in front of a fire,” and “Exploring the cliffs that afternoon turned out to be more strenuous than they had anticipated...” leaving Sarah “limping slightly...for her white shoes were not suitable for scrambling over cliffs,” and nobody's ever heard of television or the Internet, so these people are forced to walk and talk and cook and read and act in plays and generally amuse themselves without any blinking boxes to plug themselves into. That alone makes the fictional world of this novel a place some readers want to visit and revisit.

If you too want to slip into a fictional world where people say what they mean in complete sentences made up of traditionally printable words, consider whether they're really “in love” before they flop into bed, and entertain themselves and one another using real-world skills rather than buying gadgets, then A Chance for Love has a good chance of pleasing you. This is a sweet romance, not a steamy one. It's still meant for married women to read when we want to put on the right mood for meeting our husbands after work, but the target mood is “cheerful and chatty” rather than “flushed and sweaty.”

Though cheap when new, A Chance for Love has become a collector's item. To buy it online, send $25 per book + $5 per package (8-12 books of this size will fit into the package) + $1 per online payment to the appropriate address at the very bottom of the screen.