FREE LOVE

England in 1967, when conventions and the establishment are being spurned by a new generation, is mirrored in the sudden implosion of a middle-class family.

Could the Fischers, resident in the “odorous thick peace of the suburbs,” with their private schools and tennis clubs, be any more typically bourgeois? Decent Roger Fischer is a senior civil servant at the Foreign Office, providing comfortably for his attractive wife, Phyllis, teenage daughter, Colette, and precocious son, Hugh. But a social revolution is coming, and “the whole deadly enticement of a bourgeois life, ordered and upholstered and bathed in warm light,” is about to be torn asunder, as reflected in Phyllis’ impulsive involvement with disapproving young visitor Nicky Knight. Enraptured, sexually smitten, and naïvely awakened to issues of politics, injustice, and race, Phyllis abandons everything to be with Nicky, immersing herself in a new bohemian life in a run-down corner of London, smoking dope, befriending a Black nurse from Grenada, and earning a tiny income from odd jobs. Colette, too, becomes unbound by her mother’s actions, while Roger must confront lies and loves past that are tightly interwoven into the new scenario. A fine chronicler of domesticity, of social status and psychological nuance, Hadley has set up easy targets for herself in this narrowly populated tale marked by stark symbolism, from Phyllis’ abrupt change of course to the decaying, once-grand art deco apartment building where Nicky and others of his freethinking ilk live, surrounded by a wasteland bulldozed in preparation for an enormous elevated highway. Talk of the Paris uprising and the anti-Vietnam protests evoke the era, but the novel offers more emotional solidity in what is being left behind—reflected in Roger’s bewildered endurance—than in what lies ahead.

A not-quite-persuasive account of passion and revolution.