In my last post, I got the ball rolling with what it’s like to read or watch a slow-burn romance. In this blog I take a look at my Top 5 Slow-Burn Romances.
1 The Princess of Babylon (1768) Voltaire
A rich, fantastical global travel adventure set in ancient Egyptian times, with the Babylonian princess, Formosanta, and Indian shepherd/prince, Amazan. They travel the globe in search of each other, in a long, involved journey full of near-misses, meetings, misunderstandings, and reversal of the chase (she chases him, or he chases her). ‘“As he turned into Batavia, Formosanta flew towards Albion … Amazan’s ship and the princess’s crossed one another, and almost touched … Ah! Had they but known it! But tyrannic destiny would not allow it.”
Ah! Had they but known it! So we get to know the rules of the game – it’s going to be a story about lovers who are definitely meant for each other, but they’ll keep missing each other all through the novel. So with every chapter, we want to know how they’re going to manage to miss each other this time. And are they ever going to ‘win the game’ as you might say, and finally get to the goal of a happy ending? And we think about how chance (or ‘destiny’) functions in our lives.
2 Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (1813)
So thinking about reading as playing a game, and thinking about falling in love with a book, literary theorist Wolfgang Iser, writing in 1972, asserted that the “game of the imagination” is the sum total of the reading experience. Which brings me on to my second choice.
Pride and Prejudice has wowed us all in countless editions, films and adaptations (not to mention Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in 2016), the story of the rude but delicious Mr Darcy and the internally strong, intensely passionate Elizabeth (Lizzy) Bennet. Wolfgang Iser talks about how a text has ‘gaps’ in it, which the reader is continually filling in, in an ‘active interweaving of anticipation and retrospection’ – expecting future developments, rethinking what has happened before.
So as you read, you’re constantly asking questions: Who is it that’s paid to save the reputation of Lizzy’s sister? Turns out, it’s that rude Mr Darcy. Does that mean he isn’t as obnoxious as he seems? Is it because he’s a lovely person, or because he’s really in love with Lizzy? Or both? Why does Lizzy refuse to say she won’t marry Mr Darcy? Is it because she won’t do as she’s told? (“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.”). Or could it be because she’s in love with Mr Darcy? Maybe she doesn’t despise him, as she’s insisted so often. And when, when, are they ever going to be able to get together and tell each other the truth? When they finally do, “They walked on, without knowing in what direction. There was too much to be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to any other objects.”
And it feels like the perfect thing for the author to say, at this point, because it very much describes how the reader’s been experiencing the novel – as Iser says, “our enjoyment is derived from surprises, from betrayals of our expectations”. Mr Darcy and Lizzy Bennett are always being surprised by each other, and their expectations are continually betrayed, as when Mr. Darcy refuses to dance with Lizzy, or Lizzy refuses Mr Darcy’s first proposal.
3 Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) Edmond Ronsard
My top two choices have happy endings, but Cyrano de Bergerac is a classic tragedy, a play this time. Cyrano the poet is in love with Roxane, but he’s ugly, so she never thinks of him as a lover, and he therefore never asks her out – or whatever the seventeenth-century equivalent is. Cyrano writes love letters for his handsome but dumb soldier friend, Christian. Roxane falls in love with Christian because of the letters. Christian dies in battle, and Roxane goes into a nunnery.
Years later, dying of an injury, Cyrano visits her, and she realises too late that he was the writer of the letters and therefore the man she really loved. That too late is the stuff of tragedy all over – Romeo and Juliet is a good example. And what does it mean to really love someone? Is it about appearance, or is it about character? This is another one where viewers might post videos of themselves sobbing their eyes out, just as they did with the ending of One Day. So we look back on all the wasted years, his silence, her devotion to someone who wasn’t real, and that question of whether we ever really know what’s going on inside the head of even someone we think we know (Roxane thought she was in love with Christian, and she never noticed the feelings of her long-term friend, Cyrano). There have been many film versions, with the notable 1990 film starring Gerard Depardieu, and the 2021 remake with Peter Dinklage.
Cyrano has a tragic ending that, as I proposed in my previous blog post, fits in with the reader’s feeling of having lost something as they get to the end of the story, in a way, because you’ve finished it. Therefore a tragic ending or an ending with loss is somehow more in keeping with that reader’s desire which has been fulfilled, but at the same time is still there at the end of the book.
4 Normal People (2010) Sally Rooney
Normal People is one of the best books of 2010, and then a hit TV mini-series in 2018. Like many slow-burn romances, it spans many years, beginning at school. Social contexts and individual character stand in their way, and both Connell and Marianne have other short relationships over the years. The story arc is all about their initial social inequality, as well as Mariane’s tendency to live life in intense one-to-one relationships, and Connell’s preference for having a big social network. As you read, you know they should be together (“I’m not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me”), and they’re led along forking paths and chance events, betrayals and wounds, as well as intensity of feeling – and you go along with them. You’re engaging in that imaginative game, you long for them to get together, so just as the characters discover that “Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head”, you find that the novel is “the thing you bring with you inside your own head”.
And it has that poignant reflection on time and memory, so Marianne lingers over her memories, and thinks about which ones she wants to keep: “Her eyes fill up with tears again and she closes them. Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she’s aware of this now, while it’s happening. She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life.” By this stage, memories themselves are the precious things, rather than the living moments – and memory is always about loss, the loss of the living moment – and as we finish the book, we linger over it too, turn it over in our minds, revisit it, perhaps, by reading it again, with hindsight.
By the end, we understand with the characters how much their relationship, or non-relationship, has formed them and is a part of them. “All these years, they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.”
5 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2022) Gabrielle Zevin
And here we really truly are in the world of the game – because it’s the setting of the book. Sam and Sadie are game designers, working in partnership, but also separately after quarrelling. So Wolfgang Iser’s idea of the ‘game of the imagination’ between reader and book is brought out into full view. And very much like a video game, the novel unfolds, revisiting the same central point of getting the two characters together, and then drifting away again, over and over. A game is always there to be played again, with the same goals, the same rules, the same opportunities for variation, and choices, and mistakes, but with enough of a range of possibilities to fully engage the player, and to keep them trying. “We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen.” And again, that reflection about memory, and hindsight: “This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.”
The characters discuss the games they play and design, and reflect on what a game is: “And this is the truth of any game – it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.” At one point Sam thinks, “If this were a game, he could hit pause. He could restart, say different things, the right ones this time. He could search his inventory for the item that would make Sadie not leave.” Sam ends up creating an actual game online to try and reach Sadie through it.
And although the novel itself is following the rules, and playing the game of a slow-burn romance, the characters are thinking about the difference between games-playing and life as we experience it, just as a succession of days, which we slot into and then slot out of. The novel’s title comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who understands life in this way: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death.” And so that seems to be a thought at the heart of this novel too.
Slow-burn reading
So there you have it. Slow-burn romances are pretty much symbolic of the whole reader-book relationship, the reader’s desire, and the mutual game of the imagination that a reader and a book play together.