At the heart of any love story worthy of the name is a mystery. This mystery — unlike the crime-fuelled ones found regularly between book covers — is shared by authors, readers, and characters alike. It has been with us for millennia and will, with any luck, be with us for at least a little while longer. While innumerable explanations have been offered over the years, none is altogether complete, persuasive, or satisfying. Perhaps the most compelling and frustrating part of the mystery is that encountering it — whether in life or in art — is both inordinately rare and excessively common.
The mystery consists of a series of questions that are simple to pose but impossible to answer: What, why, how, and to what end is love? In Colin McAdam’s Daphnis and Chloe, even Love personified, the novel’s narrator, can’t quite solve it.
Daphnis and Chloe is a modern retelling of Longus’s second-century Greek pastoral by the same name as well as a...
John Casey is a writer and photographer from Montreal, now living in Toronto.
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