By Simon Demetriou
If you’re going to tell a story that even your narrator acknowledges is unoriginal, you’ve effectively got three methods of ensuring your story is better than other, similar stories. You can make us fall in love with your characters; you can include enough unexpectedness in either your observations or your intermediate plotting; or you can write with sharper phrasing than other writers. Madeleine Gray’s debut tells the story of a younger woman having an affair with an older man who – surprise! – doesn’t leave his wife. Unfortunately, while Gray banks on the vivacity of her narrator and the bite of her prose, neither does quite enough to lift this book out of the merely above-average.
Our narrator is Hera, an ex-secondary-school-overachiever turned directionless arts graduate. Having spent as much time as she can reasonably (or unreasonably) manage deferring entry to the workforce through the accumulation of three degrees, Hera finally secures a position as an online community moderator, which ends up being an exercise in pointlessly colour-coding potentially inflammatory comments and ‘doing nothing, except making it evident we had seen it.’ Given a job totally void of meaning or stimulation, interest turns to Arthur, the journalist in his 40s who works on the opposite side of the group desk, motivated initially by the conclusion that ‘If I’m really going to embrace corporate culture, it’s basically imperative I fuck the old guy, right?’ Hera has, after all, ‘seen Grey’s Anatomy’. Once the imperative is fulfilled, other feelings take over. Love, yes, but also the desire to ‘have a life which didn’t require me to make decisions anymore.’
The description above offers a little taste of the good and less good elements of the novel. Gray’s depictions of the younger Hera, culminating in her job search, are often excellent, punctuated by apt and wittily used pop-culture references (no book that makes a Black Books reference can ever be all bad), as well as evocative and resonant observations. The problems lie in the affair itself, or more pertinently, in the underlying psychological states to which Gray – and Hera – insistently and repeatedly attribute Hera’s motivations in pursuing Arthur no matter the costs. There are some nebulous mummy issues and a repeated assertion of a life more or less devoid of feeling and joy. The problem is that we are told all this and shown, basically, none of it. So, for this reader anyway, rather than coming across as endearing, it comes across as annoyingly mopey. Which is a shame, because much of what Hera says and does is very engaging, and very engagingly written. There’s promise here, and I’ll probably read Gray’s next book. But I’ll be hoping the second one is better.
