Married Chris encounters Fong from Hong Kong in a Chinese restaurant in Grimsby. Can true love overcome the obstacles to their relationship?
The novel is written in the first-person and past tense from the perspective of Chris. The plot adopts a classic four part structure with major turning points at the quarter, half and three-quarters marks. There’s plenty of incident and the pace is kept up right to the end; I certainly didn’t guess the final twist.
There were moments when the narrative flow was interrupted for one of the characters to impart some nuggets of background research, for example on the history of Chinese food in Britain and on graphology. Research can add verisimilitude to a fiction but it can also undermine a character when they take time out from the story to discourse on the history of chopsticks like a professor in a lecture hall.
My fundamental problem was with the protagonist. I found him obnoxious. He is determinedly misogynistic. He seems to see women purely in terms of whether they are physically beautiful or not. They are either Aphrodite or an ogress. He is horrible about women who get in his way. Cynthia is described as "the once handsome woman withering on the vine of life ... [with] the frigidly anaphrodisiac effect of a sexless maiden aunt." (Ch 15) who is "maliciously creating mischief because she thinks we are responsible for Robert's suicide" (Ch 16) Cynthia has just lost her husband. Chris’s wife is a "hysterical vixen" (Ch 17); Chris manages to sound peeved when “conjugal services of ironing and laundering and some meals were curtailed.” She has just discovered he is committing adultery.
Even the woman he professes to love is considered almost purely in physical terms. His first impression of Fong is her “thrilling mouth with lips enticingly proud asking to be kissed ... the landscape of her blouse” (Ch 1). When he hears of her marriage, is he sympathetic to the compromises she has been forced into? No. He has visions of “this randy taxi driver prising Fong open night on night, fucking her every which way, cackling with lust as he mauls and defiles her body beautiful.” (Ch 23) When he imagines her growing old the description is again primarily in physical terms (“all images too ghastly to be willingly conceived”; Ch 27) and only afterwards does he talk, briefly, in a single sentence, about her personality.
It is really difficult to believe Chris when he professes to love Fong, given that he deceives her repeatedly in the first half of the book. All he wants is sex. He repeatedly reminisces about his pre-marital lovers. He has sex at every opportunity, even after a cremation and again before the burial of (different) ashes.
He’s never sorry, except for himself. Nothing is ever his fault. He excuses his adultery: "I was lonely ... Most of the men I know have had affairs ... I've been faithful for six years of marriage. After the previous decade acting a Lothario I'm deserving some sort of credit ... Monogamy is an artefact of religious doctrine and cultural conditioning." (Ch 17) Both in his inner mind and in dialogue he blames his wife.
His shallowness extends to his career: “I admit to not being a natural salesman ... I was seduced by the regalia of swish suits and current model company cars and the prospect of a better life.” (Ch 1)
It's not that I mind that the protagonist is misogynistic and unlikeable. I've used unpleasant anti-heroes myself, even as narrators. The problem comes with his superficiality. Because it is difficult to build a three-dimensional character if all the reader is told is the surface. It's possible. I think that Ivy Compton-Burnett achieves this in Parents and Children, using little more than (very formal) dialogue but she uses a third-person perspective. Having a non-empathetic narrator means, I think, that the only character who can take on solidity is the narrator themselves. And in this novel, while Chris does take on a life as a character, as you can see from my rant above, the others, even Fong, appear to be puppets. They didn’t feel real.
This is a shame because there were a lot of good things about this book, such as the incident-stuffed plot and the pacing. It’s entertaining. The settings are well-described and, as the selected quotes show, the author has a way with words. But the flimsiness of the characters made it hard for me to care what happened in the second half of the book.
Selected quotes:
- "Stooped raincoats with upturned collars and downturned heads scurried past, candidates to model for the last Lowry painting." (Ch 1)
- "A half-mug of cocoa had died waiting to be drunk, the thick skin its body bag." (Ch 2)
- "I rocked from foot to foot as if waiting for a bus on a cold day" (Ch 5): the protagonist's attempt to dance a waltz.
- "Motes from the bedding surfed on the sunrays streaming across the room." (Ch 6)
- "Her head was drooped like the bloom of a rain burdened flower." (Ch 16)
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