We’re kind of bamboozled by this book. It is completely out
of any boundaries and expectations set for lesroms. It is twisting, twisted and
throbs with secrets clawing to get out. It is intense and entirely immersive.
Mrs. Hamilton, an American, knows her husband is cheating on
her with someone across the pond. She meets the woman, Marella, a high class
prostitute, to find that the woman in question doesn’t take clients herself any
more but makes perfect matches for her clients. Mrs. Hamilton is in a state of
existential ennui where the cheating doesn’t matter anymore and to give
validity to her meeting arranges for an escort for herself. As she is waiting,
taking in the square below the balcony of her hotel room, she changes her mind
and cancels the tryst. Clo, Mrs. Hamilton’s assigned escort (“Prostitution. You
can call it what it is,” says Clo.), doesn’t receive the cancellation message in time and
turns up. The two women connect and spend the night together talking, with a
side of a massage thrown in. In spending the night with Mrs. Hamilton, Clo
misses her meeting with her friend, Laura, who’s going
through a rough patch in her marriage and with Susan, a friend rediscovered after
decades who has just come to London from the States. Laura and Susan end up
spending the evening together with Susan holding Laura through a meltdown.
The four lives crisscross and tangle
with other lives in strange ways. The book fairly vibrates with threat of something
racing to derail the new relationships in a way you want to know what’s coming
next and each character’s past. You find yourself praying for the lovers to get
together. You desperately want them
to be together and are as willing to write the rest of the story yourself as
you are to read what is already written.
It is a great achievement that by the
end of the book, you are actually uncertain about morally ambiguous
relationships and are left wondering what relationship you actually want for
the complicated characters – especially the unresolved relationship in the end.
We have a sneaking suspicion that Ashton actually started off planning a
Fran/Isabelle or a Fran/Amelia relationship in the past – but even she couldn’t handle the complications that the
latter pairing would cause.
Admittedly the depth of emotions
between characters is rather fast, but given the intensity of the book, you don’t
realise the insta-emotions aspect much.
This complicated book (with some great
sex scenes to boot) is certainly a lesfic must-read.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
