Taming the Beast [Paperback]

Maguire's very readable prose treads a fine line between porn-lite and a more serious exploration of young desire

I was very impressed by Taming the Beast Maguire heads into extraordinarily dark psychosexual territory, withholding any easy answers

'It’s a bleak, uneasy book, albeit powerfully written. It is also shockingly compelling’

Sarah Clark?s life is irrevocably changed at the age of fourteen when her English teacher, Mr Carr, seduces her after class. Their affair is illegal, erotic, passionate and dangerous ? a vicious meeting of minds and bodies. But when Mr Carr?s wife discovers the affair he has to choose between them and moves to another city with his family. Sarah is devastated and from that day on her life is defined by a series of meaningless, self-abasing sexual encounters, hoping with each man that she will experience the same delicious feelings she had with Mr Carr. Seven years later Daniel Carr walks back into Sarah?s life and she is drawn once again into the destructive relationship. Is Sarah strong enough to ?tame the beast??

Emily Maguire was born in Canberra, Australia in 1976, but now lives in Sydney, where she works as an English teacher. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (History and English) and a Master of Arts (English). Her non-fiction has been published in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Adelaide Advertiser, The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian, Good Reading, dumbo feather and The Glebe. Emily Maguire's first novel Taming the Beast was described as 'a thought-provoking and searing first novel' in The Age, and was published in the UK by Serpent's Tail and by Brandl & Schlesinger in Australia. Her second novel The Gospel According to Luke was bought by Serpent's Tail in the UK and by Brandl & Schlesinger in Australia. Emily was awarded an Australian Society of Authors Mentorship in 2003, a Tasmanian Writers' Centre Residency in 2006 and received a Special Commendation in the 2006 Kathleen Mitchell Awards.

Taming the Beast by Emily Maguire Leadtext: Sarah Clark felt like a freak for two and a half years. It started when she received a leather-bound copy of Othello for her twelfth birthday and ended when her English teacher showed her exactly what was meant by the beast with two backs. In between, she read every one of Shakespeare's plays and then moved on to his sonnets, before discovering Marlowe, Donne, Pope and Marvell. With peers who read nothing but TV Week and parents who were inclined towards the Financial Review, Sarah was forced to conceal her literary leanings. She hid poetry anthologies under her bed and read Emmaby torchlight, the way boys her age read Playboy. For the first two years of high school, she came top of her English class without opening a single school book. It wasn't necessary since the curriculum consisted of a few familiar texts, plus comic strips and newspaper clippings. Then on the first day of the third year of high school, Sarah met Mr Carr. He was unlike any teacher she had ever encountered. For the entire forty minutes of his first class he spoke about why Yeats was relevant to Australian teenagers in the year 1995. In the second class, Sarah put up her hand to make a comment on something he had said about Hamlet. When he called on her to speak, she started and could not stop. She stayed in his classroom all through lunch, and when she re-emerged into the sunlight and the condescending stares of the schoolyard cliques, she was utterly changed. Mr Carr began an active campaign to keep Sarah's love of learning alive. To prevent boredom, he brought her books of his own from home and gave her a note that allowed her to access the senior section of the library. Every novel and play and poem was discussed in depth. She had never received a better compliment than when he told her that he knew she would love a particular piece because it was his favourite too. While Mr Carr was shaping Sarah's mind, her body was changing of its own accord. Small, painful breasts appeared overnight, as did ridiculously placed hair. She kept waking up in the middle of the night to find her blankets tossed to the floor and her hands tangled up in her pyjamas. Whenever the School Captain, a lanky blond boy named Alex, walked past, Sarah had an inexplicable urge to press her thighs together. She started to daydream about how to become more beautiful. One day in June, Mr Carr asked Sarah's advice on how to make Shakespeare more exciting for the class. The sonnets studied so far had failed to ignite a spark of enthusiasm in anyone except Sarah, and he thought she could help identify where he was going wrong. The problem, as Mr Carr saw it, was that many of the sonnets dealt with themes that couldn't be understood by your average fourteen year old kid. Sarah told him that the average fourteen year old understood plenty about love and lust and longing; it was the language that put them off. After all, she said, every second song on the radio dealt with the same themes as old William, albeit with more grunting and less wit. He laughed a throaty laugh and reached across the space that separated them. His hot, damp hand settled on her bare knee. Sarah noticed, all at once, that his forehead was shiny and the blinds were lowered and the door was closed and her heart was racing. She didn't move or speak. Breathing was all she could manage. Mr Carr leant forward in his chair and moved his hand to Sarah's shoulder, then let it slide until it rested on one of her never before touched, brand new breasts. She felt like she might cry, but she also felt a sick kind of excitement. She sat very still with her arms at her sides and watched as he stroked and kneaded her breasts through the cheap polyester. His gold wedding band caught the light, and she wanted to reach out and touch it, but didn't. He was saying her name over and over, so that it no longer sounded like her name at all, but like one those mantras that Buddhists used to go into a trance. Sarahohsarahohsarahohsarhohsarah.