Josephine Hart is best known for Damage, a slight, family-based melodrama from which the following line was later culled for the English Dictionary of Quotations: "Damaged people are dangerous; they know they can survive." Evidently still punching the air (demurely) with delight at having literarily arrived, Hart litters her latest work with many more such trite truisms. These range from the meaningless - "You don't really know something, until you are ready to deal with its consequences" (rubbish: I, for instance, know there is a vast tidal wave heading for Norfolk, but I am in no way ready to deal with its consequences); through the nonsensical - "For some, love is an alien invasion and they feel terror that it might sicken and die inside them" (if it's an alien invasion, surely you'd be pleased when it died?); to the utterly banal - "Every relationship carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. Often it's a secret suddenly discovered, and sometimes one that's never revealed" (I think what she means here is that some people split up and some don't). Perhaps Hart thinks she is in the possession of a rare aphoristic gift. In this, she is quite wrong.
The dialogue is better, although it suffers from all sounding the same, no matter who is saying it, and from not sounding remotely like anything any living person would say. Elements of the plot are clumsily dropped into the chatter, frequently things you've already heard, as if Hart is anxious that your brain might have etch-a-sketched away the previous ten pages when you went to make tea. Her concern is touching, but it leaves her work sounding a lot like Sunset Beach ("But my baby, Jimbo! The one I conceived with your brother, when his wife, my sister, went for a lesbian scuba-dive with your boss! Remember?"). The description is woeful - people look out into a "desiccated-grape coloured night". (I have given this some thought. A desiccated grape is a raisin. Does she simply mean "very dark"? Or "very dark with a brown tinge, as if in the past the site of a chemical weapon attack"? It's impossible to tell, but you know, I think she means purple. I suggest that, in future, she just says so.)
I have shied away from describing the plot, because it's all gong and no dinner: it squeezes suspense mechanisms to death without setting up a denouement worthy of them. Therefore, if I tell you the end, I will ruin it; but if I don't tell you the end, I will ruin it by making you think the end is worth waiting for. Let's leave it at this: our protagonist is a psychiatrist, of a strange post-Freudian school called Repeat Small Adages to People and Their Madness Will Cease. He has a dark family secret; something has happened to his parents. Are they dead? Let's hope so. His sister is very much with him - she is in possession of a miraculous beauty. They frolic naked together, these related grown-ups, yet have never done the nasty. She is a crazy neurotic, but marriage to the right man shall settle her. The right man arrives. He has no character at all, apart from a house in Eaton Square and a personal fortune of several millions. The family struggle is resolved; nothing about the situation has changed, except the purchase of the house in which it occurred many moons ago. This seems to be the answer to the vale of tears that is life: marry well, and spend, spend, spend. It's roughly what you'd get if you crossed Joan Rivers with Margaret Thatcher. What a thought.
Zoe Williams is a columnist on the London Evening Standard
