The energy in a Tessa Hadley novel typically flows from a character’s unvoiced longing or suppressed desire, gestured at in flashback over the course of a present-day narrative seamlessly encompassing the previous half-century, as in 2015’s The Past or 2019’s Late in the Day, titles that sum up the mood, if not the excitement, of her work.
At first glance, Free Love breaks with all that. It takes us from 1967 into 1968 in the company of a flighty middle-aged mother of two, Phyllis, who quits married life in the stockbroker belt with a Foreign Office high-up after falling for a mouthy young dinner guest, Nicky, the would-be revolutionary son of family friends working in oil. An after-dinner search for a child’s missing sandal supplies the pretext for a clinch in the dusk; soon, Phyllis is knocking on the door of Nicky’s rundown flat in eye-openingly multicultural west London every Wednesday, under cover of visiting her father in Leamington Spa.
