(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
There’s a popularly-held very binary dynamic at work when it comes to love stories.
You’re either falling wildly and hopelessly in love with nothing but wine and roses and sunshine through dew drop eyes ahead of you … OR … you have reached the end of the line, the smoking ruin of all that romantic promise and conjugal bliss reminding that what once lived is now well and truly dead and buried.
Never the twain shall meet it seems; unless, of course, your Kimberley Allsopp and you approach what love is, becomes and might be again in Rise and Shine, her brilliantly told novel which explores the great love affair of August and Noah whose marriage soars, then tanks then … well, is there anywhere after that?
It turns out there is, and this delightfully unorthodox look at love’s beginning and end and what might follow after that is a sheer unadulterated joy that goes to some very dark places while always keeping an eye firmly on the innate humanity at the heart of the story.
In fact, it’s highly possible that Rise and Shine is one of the best love stories to come along in quite some time, a novel which celebrates how joyous falling in love, but how, as the years wear on, it can tired, outdated and in needs of replacing.
Or does it? Even if you get to that point, is there another way forward?
And that was how their marriage went. A rollercoaster for years, and then for a few more years, the tail end of a rollercoaster. That part where it goes flat and all the momentum that has come before is the only thing pushing you along, until you can stop and disembark. But isn’t there always the hope, held in your gut — the place where you feel everything when you’re on a rollercoaster — that it will begin that slkow climb again? Maybe the flatness and the hope is the truer metaphor of a long marriage between good people.
In the daylight, where did August and Noag find themselves?
At its heart, Rise and Shine is a story about what happens when your life loses its happiness and you feel unmoored from who you are and what you want from life.
It’s tricky finding a way forward when you’re navigating life as a single person, but it becomes exponentially moe complicated when you are in a relationship, and especially a longstanding one where you are so embedded with the other person that figuring out who you are and what you need to do to find happiness again becomes fiendishly hard to do.
How do you know who are all by yourself when you are so quickly and readily defined in the context of being intimately involved with someone else.
It’s a huge question with no easy answer and it’s one that confronts August as she struggles to work out why she doesn’t feel joy anymore – not just in her achievements but as a partner to Noah who seems ostensibly happy with he is and where he is in life.
But as Rise and Shine progresses in ways funny and poignant, touching and confronting, and always gloriously human, he also begins to understand that maybe he isn’t as happy as he hope and he, like August, has let them unwittingly atrophy and fossilise at the very same time as they thought, erroneously as it turns out, that they were living their best life.
So, the plug is pulled, and the apple cart upset but where on earth do August and Noah go from here?
(courtesy official Kimberley Allsopp Instagram)
That is a question that Rise and Shine tackles so wonderfully well.
In a highly original approach that dares to look beyond the obvious punctuation points of love, Allsopp’s rich and wondrously good novel dares to imagine that what looks like the end of something may not be quite so final after all.
That’s a tricky concept to wrestle with for most people because human beings generally love life, which is messy and chaotic and which defies any easy organisation (despite our best attempts), to sit in well demarcated, black-and-white sections.
They hate it when it leaps out of its lane because suddenly what seemed reasonably easy to categorise and deal with becomes a whole lot of confoundingly messy with no clear path forward and dealing with that means grappling with complications without number.
That’s why love in its traditional neat and tidy storytelling forms is so appealing.
You’re either in love or not, and thus are spared struggling to interpret complicated feelings which do not yeild to analysis, forensic or otherwise, easily and which are even harder to work through when it’s not just you in the mix.
Watching as August is brave enough to take some fairly dramatic steps, with Noah following in her wake, desperately thrown at first but then forced to find his own accommodation with a new drastic normal, is compelling, immersive and oh so authentic, full of love, estrangement, humour, deep sadness and affectingly heartfelt journey from love to not-love to … well, what usually follows after that?
And they both sat next to each other in the car, looking out the front window until a kid kicked a football onto the windscreen and Noah leant across to kiss August on the cheek before she started the engine to drop him home.
This is where Allsopp winningly defies the usual answers that would be trotted out at this point.
With empathy, wit and real, grounded charm, Rise and Shine steps back, looks at what should conventionally happens when unhappiness reigns and love dies while you are trying to live it, and asks whether there’s a way back from the abyss?
To say much more would be to spoil what is a refreshingly rich and original love story, set in Brisbane, Australia, but suffice to say, Rise and Shine doesn’t slot easily into any love story binaries, choosing instead to explore how life is rarely as easily dealt with or categorised as we might like.
It understands how much we need things to be simple and straghtforward but how, when it comes to loving someone else, and expressing ourselves in the midst of that, it never as easy as we want it to be.
For a novel that embraces the death of love as much how alive and buoyantly good it can be, Rise and Shine is full of real hope and optimism.
Even in its darkest places, it stays warmly and refreshingly honest at all times, acknowledging all the assumption we make and the expectations we can carry, and how we use them to shape our way of looking at the world, especially our personal slice of it, but also asking whether what we assume follows the death of love is all there is and that maybe, jusy maybe, there is another way where a love story night be able to begin all over again …