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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"You just look for someone and they want you." , 28 July 2008
In a novel that is all about the power of luck, two childhood friends are torn apart by catastrophe. The young and brittle Dara is a compassionate social worker who mentors at a woman's center in central London. Dara has spent much of her adult life frantically searching for true love and happiness and perhaps even marriage with her two-timing boyfriend, Edward a violinist who made his living teaching and who is living with his former girlfriend and their 2-year-old daughter.
Even as Edward refuses to commit, Dara remains somewhat irrational over her reasons, for feeling so insecure, her hopes for an easy intimacy with Edward always so out of reach. Adding to her turmoil is the strange and somewhat fractured relationship that she has with Cameron, her distant father who mysteriously deserted Dara when she was only ten. Her skills as a councilor certainly haven't made her own life any easier.
As Dara tries hard to mask her longing for Edward, constantly living like a soothsayer, poring over signs and omens, always apparently convinced that he will make good on his promises, she tries to build an independent life for herself living in the downstairs flat in the house on Fortune Street, owned by her best friend Abigail.
The fiery and independent Abigail, however couldn't be more different from the emotionally frail Dara. While Dara is shaped by the belief that childhood influences shape your psyche and your adult life; Abigail has been molded by her ambition and her belief that if you work hard you could control almost everything, including your feelings. A rather self-centered girl, Abigail has spent much of her life pursuing her own physical and emotional needs, never quite understanding how her best friend could be so needy for a man to make her happy. Abigail, given her history has always been a complicated mixture of stinginess and generosity. Haunted by her own parents - her athletic, mercurial father, and her charming, sylphlike mother, life for Abigail has been all about the struggle for survival and moving out and having to support herself when she was only fifteen.
Although the friendship between Dara and Abigail remains at the core of Livesy's beautiful and engaging novel, there are two other characters who constantly circle around them - Abigail's boyfriend Sean, who has a passion for Keats and who as the novel opens, is being employed his friend Valentine to write six chapters of handbook for euthanasia; and Dara's father, Cameron, who has struggled to shield his inappropriate desires throughout much of his life. Although Cameron has always felt responsible for his brother Lionel's death, it is only through seeing a copy of Alice in Wonderland with an essay about Charles Dodgson that he begins to glimpse some dark, aberrant corner of himself: "for the first time I knew there was someone else like me, someone else whose desires didn't fit into any appropriate category."
It is Livesy's intricately structured association of the lives of these four characters that propels this narrative forward to its devastating conclusion. Sean is baffled by the demise of his marriage to his wife, Judy and is plagued by an irrevocable closing down of certain possibilities. He worries about Abigail's sudden "busyness" where she never seems to have a moment, "there was always a patron to be wooed, an actor to be coached." Now the natural channels of communication between him and Abigail, those "glittering lively streams that has begun to flow at their first meeting," are clogged with doubt and disagreement, and forced underground. Cameron must deal with the split from his wife Fiona and the shattering of family's dream, his clandestine urges finally driving a wedge into their marriage. Luckily though, Cameron survives, a truly wearied soul who is healed with time and circumstance, the façade of propriety remaining somewhat intact as he is forced to make a new life for himself in London. Surprisingly, it Cameron remains constantly in awe and envy of his daughter's kindness and emotional transparency.
For her part, Dara oscillates between "idyllic daydreams and precautionary disasters" and a metaphorical headache that is suddenly piercingly literal. When her office becomes a winter of discontent, it is not surprising that she ends up feeling taken for granted, miserable and betrayed on both the work and home fronts. Finally there's Abigail, who given her history has always been a complicated mixture of stinginess and generosity and even as she stares at the muddy water of the Thames, she's plagued by the fact that she always seemed to keep her best friend at a distance.
This novel is all about the nature of love, sex, family and friendships, and the needs of men and women, the roles of partners, the unforeseen and devastating betrayals that can shake us up at various times in our lives, and how our parents can often influence and damage the surfaces of our lives. There are some painful revelations here, but also some delicately nuanced observations as both Dara and Abigail - and Sean and Cameron - are forced to reconcile with their own version of Eden from which they have been abruptly and irrevocably expelled. Mike Leonard 2008.
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