"Ideality" by Kai Alyx Sarus

Aurora's ex-husband is controlling and manipulative? Is her new boyfriend the same?

At 50, Aurora is a successful team leader when her company goes bankrupt and her ex-husband announces that he wants her back. Can she make a go of her new career as a music journalist? After all, when she was a teenager she was an ardent fan of heavy metal group Morpheme. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the start of the book because there were some nice phrases showing that the author can use words to create excellent images (see the selected quotes which come mostly from the early chapters). I also enjoyed discovering the mundane reality of Aurora's daily life which make a nice counterpoint to her memory-focused dreams. Aurora loses her job and starts a new career. But suddenly there was a major turning point at the 50% mark and we were into a love story in which the male leads were control freaks. It almost seemed like a new book and significant moments in the first half, such as the collapse of the company pension scheme, became virtually irrelevant to the plot.

It was written in the third person past, almost entirely from the perspective of the protsgonist but occasionally straying into the interior monologue of another character. 

There are some crucial moments of conflict in the second half of the story; these are moments when the story comes alive. But there are also large areas where conflict seems entirely absent. For example, Aurora has almost instant success when she begins a totally new career as a music journalist. Not only is her work widely read, the  quality of it is so hugely respected that her first critical review of her work is "in-depth and flattering." (Denial). It seems unlikely.; this aspect of the story lacked verisimilitude. As Aurora thinks: "Don’t get me wrong, but this all seems a bit quick." (Displaced)

The characters were divided into goodies and baddies. Three characters were more than puppets. Protagonist Aurora as a character seems to have been developed from wish-fulfilment. Does this heroine have a flaw? David, the ex-husband, is melodramatically horrid: I could almost hear the readership booing each time he appeared on the page. At least Oliver has two sides to him although by the time this reader appreciated this we were so close to the end that there was little opportunity to explore how these two sides can work together. I wanted complex nuanced characters and I was disappointed.

On the whole, the dialogue was a little clunky. No character had any dialogic tags or mannerisms that made them sound unique. No matter how much stress they were in, characters seemed to be able to express themselves coherently and articulately, making use of normal grammatical conventions. To give two examples picked almost at random: 

• "Don’t think like that. Enjoy it, make the most of what you’ve built up and live it. You’re the only person who has made this happen. No one else can take that away from you" (Dialectic)
• "Oh, Lesley, it’s good to see you. I’m fine, but I need a favour. Is there any way that you can let me leave the pharmacy by the back door?" (Desire)

The book was enjoyable and easy to read - the pages turned quickly - but in the end there seemed to be two different stories, hinged in the middle. 

Selected quotes: 

• "She felt the day stretch out before her like a tarmac runway." (Dream)
• "Despite the alarm going off, time leaked, minute by minute, and Aurora had to rush to the tube station." (Dream)
• "The train stopped suddenly and she pushed and pardoned her way off the carriage." (Dream)
• "She was emotionally exhausted, but relieved. She had got Jacqui through the dark tunnel and out the other end, but it had cost her a little bit of herself and she felt it, like a chipped porcelain statue." (Decision)

July 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God