I've never read any Buchan, put off by the pastel covers which seem appropriate for a bland, 'older' read. But the blurb attracted me and I gave this a go. At it's heart there's an interesting story of Prue, 41, happily married to Max who is 60, who meets her stepdaughter's 39 year old husband and falls in love with a passion she has never felt before.
I liked Prue and her lover James, but felt that there was an awful lot of padding that detracted from this central interest. So Prue is rather oddly writing a biography of Joan of Arc even though she has no training or education for doing this, and the book has long, extended discursions about Joan, who is supposed to be a model of the woman who follows her passions.
Similarly, the sub-story of Emmy, James' nanny was unnecessary. And the respective spouses, Max and Violet, were represented very cruelly. By making them so unnattractive, especially Violet who ticks every box of the bitchy career woman, any moral ambiguity over the issue of adultery was wiped out and the only question was how on earth did poor Prue and James ever manage to stick with their partners in the first place.
So this could have been far better than it was: tauter, more focused, and with a more generous view of people's vulnerabilitities, rather than the forced and unambiguous 'good' and 'bad' characters that we are left with.
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