Author: Martin Simons
Publisher: Bookmasters
Rating: worthy!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!
P40 "silentl" should be "silent"
At about 17% in: "People call me up went they need me" - "went" should be "when"
At about 35% in: "tris" should be "tries"
This novel in brief, is a cross between Nabokov's Lolita, and Shaw's Pygmalion. I'd actually looked at another of Simons' novels on Netgalley, Cities at Sea and decided against it, but after reading this, I might just reconsider looking at that one.
Michael Ingram, an engineering consultant who lives by himself out in the wilds in Australia, is winding up his weekly tryst with a call-girl (the only 'date' he can get) when he discovers a girl in her early teens, almost dead, lying in the road outside his house during a severe and chill hail storm. He brings her in. She's incontinent, and dirty and wretched, but he calls for an ambulance and bathes her, wrapping her warmly while he waits. The call-girl who is with him reacts almost abusively to the discovery of this girl, calling her a 'rat' repeatedly. I have no idea what the significance of that is, and it isn't explained; it's as though the reader ought to know. Does it have a specific meaning in the context of this novel, or is it a well-known term in Australia for a lowlife teen - or a lowlife teen girl, or a young prostitute? I don’t know, and a very brief search for Australian slang didn't bring any useful results.
The call-girl has never stayed overnight with Michael, but on this one occasion, with the weather being so bad and it being so late by the time the ambulance has been and gone, she stays the night. The next morning she asks Michael to show her around his home, and she's impressed with his modest wealth and independence. She starts talking about arranging for a different girl to start visiting him because she's getting old, but Michael isn’t interested in replacing her. She then reveals that she's thinking of retiring from the game. Is she considering hooking up with Michael permanently? What she doesn’t grasp is how negatively her abusive reaction towards 'the rat' has affected Michael in his opinion of her. Even this doesn’t seem to put him off her, but his life is about to change.
He speaks with the girl's doctor the next day and the doctor advises him to come in and have blood tests - thinking Michael had sex with the girl. Obviously, he didn’t, but he has the tests as a precaution, and he ends up visiting the girl. She's recovering, but only very slowly. She's thin and tired, and she's not eating or talking, but she seems to respond to him when she hasn't done so to anyone else. She can vaguely remember the night he saved her. She won’t tell anyone her name, but she insists that the hospital staff know her, implying that she was there some time before. And she claims she killed her dad....
So Michael continues to visit, irregularly and not frequently, and Jenny continues to improve. She interacts with him when she will with no one else, even telling him her name, which turns out to be Gianetta, but she prefers Jenny. She shows great interest in learning about Michael's work and has serious insights into it. She's also an artist and she ends up earning some money for herself by drawing portraits of her fellow patients. But one thing she draws is horrible, and it represents her fear of ending up in a home and sliding down the slick slope to where she was when Michael found her.
Well I don't want to go into much more detail here otherwise I'll be telling a story when it isn't my place to tell. This story is so rich, however that there's lots more to talk about. There's the discomfort for one thing. My discomfort is not so much what Simons describes, which is pretty graphic (or more to the point, ugly graphic, so be warned), as the fact that I know what he describes isn't just confined to fiction: it's out there in the real world, too. Children, both boys and girls alike, are put through what Jenny goes through in this fictional world, but they face it for real, and it's sickening.
There are other forms of discomfort present, too. Eventually, and it's no big spoiler to pass this on because it's clear from the blurb that this is going to happen, the two share his house together and their relationship is, for me, running down the wrong side of dangerously inappropriate, but Simons writes well and slips in little preparatory passages here and there. He manages to walk that tightrope more or less successfully - dependent, of course upon your own personal position. In that, he's aided by the fact that it's not really a child and an adult here, it's more like two children, given Michael's rather handicapped position in life, and from that perspective, it's a lot easier to see what's going on. For me, I have to say I hope child services doesn't work that way, but this is fiction and I could see (I thought) where he was going with this.
When I finished the novel I was very disappointed in the ending which seemed to me to be a betrayal of everything which went before. I felt misled since the ending seems so completely out of line. But in some regards it did fit, so I won't say more about that! As I said, I thought this was well-written and was inventive and sensitively done. Sometimes it was a but much, and there were times when Jenny's character seemed far too fey given her supposed background. Other parts of it, too, seemed more like wild fantasy than fiction, but overall, and despite the ending, I consider this a worthy novel. It's a good story and while it wasn't necessarily executed in its best light, it is definitely worth a read if only to make you feel a bit uncomfortable in your easy reading chair!
