SOURCE: Brookner, Anita. “Of Love and Death.” Spectator 263, no. 8410 (16 September 1989): 43.

In the following review, Brookner discusses the theme of obsessive love in Falling.

The obsessive love affair used to inspire more novels than it does today, as if obsessive love were the one commodity that our consumer society could not afford. Colin Thubron dealt with such an affair most effectively in his last novel, A Cruel Madness, and he returns to the theme here [in Falling], giving it a new dimension of strangeness. Yet what emerges from both novels is the very old-fashioned Romantic notion that love and death occupy the same mysterious terrain, that the one leads inevitably to the other, and that a death, however crazed, however compromised, is the fitting conclusion—indeed the only conclusion—to the type of love which exceeds the norm, which is baroque, ardent, unsociable, and possibly, in its intensity, one-sided...