THE long marriage is a surprisingly rare subject in modern fiction – perhaps because it’s such a difficult one to nail. For Jane Rogers, award-winning author of nine novels, it is one of the most fascinating human relationships, yet it remains largely unexplored and unexplained. She longed to explore the mystery of enduring human commitment. But where to begin – and where to end?

Her solution was to create two equally matched life partners and to make Conrad, Eleanor’s husband and father to their four adult children, go AWOL while attending a conference in Munich. This disruptive act triggers much soul-searching on both sides and puts this long, rambling marriage into sharp – often painful – focus, enabling the reader to glimpse its unfathomed depths.

“It is the incident that makes them unravel and question what has changed, and how it changed,” says the slightly-built, feisty Rogers from her home in Banbury, Oxfordshire. The brutal honesty of her dialogue is at times quite literally eye-watering and puts the phrase ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ into a whole new perspective.

The disappearance occurs at a crisis point in the marriage where the put-upon Conrad “has gone from loving her to hating her and back again so many times that the path between them has worn out … There is no love. There is no hate”. Equally, Eleanor asks herself, ‘Why oh why didn’t she leave him while the going was good?’ before indulging in a “flare of excitement” of imagining him never coming back.

Both are scientists. Eleanor is a high flier making great strides in future-forward stem cell research, while Conrad struggles to attract funding for his transgenic vivisection experiments. Gender roles are reversed as he spends more time at home with the children while she works late. She is ambitious to the point of being dismissive of her children and of him (“her identity is still single, while his is tied to her and the children”). Over the years she has “negated him far more effectively than he has negated her”.

It makes for uncomfortable reading. I develop a soft spot for Con, though to my horror I see bits of myself in El. I ask Rogers (who seems startled to recall that she and her writer husband have been married for “oh, must be 40 years or so”) which of her protagonists she prefers.

“Most people prefer Con to El, as she is very driven and can be very selfish, but I don’t empathise with one over the other,” replies the author, who teaches on the MA Writing course at Sheffield Hallam University and edited OUP’s Good Fiction Guide. “When you’re writing a character and getting into their head, you empathise totally with them. One of the aims of this book was really to show both sides of this marriage, not to favour one over the other. I needed to explore it from the male and female side, particularly the power struggle when both sides are evenly matched.”

Is it based on her own marriage? “It’s not autobiographical,” she replies. “Characters are drawn from some people I know and bits are aspects of myself I have taken to the extreme in order to understand them.

“In that sense I think writing is like acting. A writer will inhabit a character and will push to learn what she can.”

Exploring the reversed gender roles was a deliberate decision: a woman, she says, is judged more harshly if she’s ambitious and following a career.

Even her children are critical of Eleanor. It’s a comment on the fact that since she and her husband were young parents in the 1980s, little has changed for working mothers – or indeed for house husbands.

“A woman is judged more harshly if she exhibits those male qualities and we are also judge a man for choosing to stay at home with the children. We’re very, very unfair. In the years between our two female prime ministers, nothing has changed and the glass ceiling still exists. Men still have the more well-paid, powerful jobs than women.”

Is Conrad and Eleanor’s a typical modern marriage?

“There’s no such thing,” retorts Rogers. “One of the reasons I wanted to write about a long marriage is that it’s one of the most common relationships but also one of the most extraordinary. I ask myself, how do two people stay married?

“I’m interested in how over 20, 30, 40 years we move through love to like to irritation and real hatred, and hopefully back again. It shifts through all the emotions in big waves of change that overtake us.

“It is perhaps a rather unfashionable thing to write about now, but I do love reading about long marriages in the great novels like Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Patrick White’s The Tree of Man.”

While her catalyctic opening is undeniably effective, the process of arriving at a satisfactory conclusion for this novel was more problematic.

Rogers had abandoned the novel (whose working title was The Experiment) in 2004 when it was halfway through at around 40,000 words. Not for nothing does she describe it as the “strange” book in her impressive canon of work.

“I had all the key characters but I couldn’t move it forward,” she says. She went on to write the Man Booker Prize longlisted The Testament of Jessie Lamb, using much of the scientific research she’d already done for Conrad and Eleanor. “I never went back to it; I just thought it was a book I’d never finish.”

Scroll forward ten years to January 2, 2014, and at the age of 61 she is in intensive care and “very sick” having suffered a catastrophic subarachnoid brain haemorrhage out of the blue. She awakes in the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford after being in a coma for three weeks, unaware of what has happened to her.

“When I came to I was extremely cross because everyone seems to be making such a fuss and I didn’t know why,” she says. “It’s very hard to make sense of the chunk of lost time. I didn’t understand what had happened or why.”

Although she is reluctant to discuss it more fully – she doesn’t want it to become the focus of our interview – it is nonetheless key to how the book finally came into being.

When she started to recover there was some debate about whether her brain might have been affected by what had happened, and she was keen to find out. “When I look at the scans I can see the chunk of tissue where the bleed was,” she says. “I wanted to see what it was like to write again, if I could at all. I didn’t have any new ideas, I just wanted to see if I could do the mechanics.

“Conrad and Eleanor were still with me. So around Easter time I started with an hour a day. I got back surprisingly quickly and soon one hour turned into two-three-four hours. I finished it in the September, which was astonishingly quick for me even in normal circumstances.”

She writes all her first drafts by hand, and as her right hand side was badly affected she wasn’t unduly fazed to find her handwriting had become “spidery and weird” to begin with. “That was bound to happen,” she remarks, having happily fully recovered. She has since written the BBC Radio 4 drama Real Worlds and is now immersed in an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea Tales.

“I hadn’t planned the ending; in 2004 I’d been very uncertain about it. I had been looking for some high drama, and struggling with what it should be. Death? Divorce? Should Maddy attack Conrad?

“But one of the things I understood deep down was that life going on is a very good way to end the story. I think the fact that I had nearly died and recovered was instrumental in my finding an ending.

“Conrad and Eleanor’s marriage was not made in heaven, but they do go on. So my own drama gave me the ending I’d been searching for. It is the silver lining to my brush with death.”

Conrad and Eleanor by Jane Rogers is published by Atlantic Books at £12.99. The author appears with Tim Parks at the Edinburgh International Book Festival at 10.15am on Tuesday August 16, 2016 (edbookfest.co.uk).

Picture credit: Laurent Denimal