A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks

This is a weirdly collated set of five short story type chapters that I have trouble connecting. They are set in various periods of time and occasionally there is a reference to a place or event that happened in another of them, for instance in the last story Freddy the protagonist is thinking about buying an apartment in an old workhouse that appeared in an earlier story. But minimal references like this can’t be the point of this novel can they? Well yes, they possibly can: at one point there is a reference to after death when our atoms mingle with other atoms to reappear as flowers or trees or the hand of a baby somewhere. So these ‘memories’ or reappearances of things and times and places are part of that. I think a lot of it is about isolation. Each of the characters wanders through the story seeking connections and intimacy and once they find it, they lose it again. In the first story the British schoolteacher come secret service agent is betrayed by the French girl he is in love with; in the second the entrepreneurial Billy loses his wife; in the third Elena the researcher loves a man she can’t have; in the fourth Jeanne falls in love with a priest and in the final story Freddy is abandoned by the love of his life. I found this a pretty unsatisfying book despite Faulks trying to be clever. It took me quite a while to understand what he was trying to get at and I still think I’ve missed most of it; in the meantime, with the exception perhaps of the last one, the stories lacked animation and hope.