A quick read of the jacket blurb and a couple of choice quotes from the book and you know that this is car-crash reading – horrible, uncomfortable but you keep turning the pages nonetheless. the car smash; the letter we shouldn't have opened; the lump in the breast or groin; the blinding flash.

Anna immediately acknowledges the erotic bond between them, and the two begin a frenzied affair, its moral complications exacerbated by the fact that Anna is the narrator's son's fiancee.A post-theatre dinner with Ed Victor, whom I did not know well at that time, resulted in his request to see the opening chapters of this novel, the writing of which my husband believed was "what I should be doing". In the final scene, the MP, stripped of his political office and living abroad as a recluse, sits in his solitary room staring at oversized photographs of Anna and Martyn on the wall. Josephine Hart must have recognized the force majeure in her own writing when she abandoned the first page of the novel as yet unwritten.

From a psychological point of view this might be seen also as primal original event which will set into motion an avalanche of other equally inescapable and devastating events that will impact upon the lives of those at the epicentre and those at the peripheries. Be it awakening from deep sleep rather than shallow existence, from not feeling into being powerfully overwhelmed by emotions, from building a false self, into being released from the pretenses, from longing for wealth and success into being fused with the significant Other. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.One can visualise it as if it were a long fox-tail she wore elegantly and defiantly through all her adult life. Much is made of Anna’s dark past (it is dark but I won’t reveal why) although I found this aspect of the story a little too contrived, particularly the scenecs where Anna’s mother verbally warns Martyn that Anna has a tortured past and in another scene, when Anna’s stepfather does similar. The MP enjoys a brief period of sexual bliss, meeting Anna in various European cities and having sex with her in unlikely places. Always an obsessive reader, I had read six books a week during a particular four years in a small town in Ireland after a double family tragedy, and continued this voracious consumption of novels after I left Ireland.

We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place. The MP runs down the stairs completely naked, finding Martyn dead, sprawled out on the ground floor. Some find it in a place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. Known for tales of sexual obsession that explore the darker aspects of the psyche, Hart (Damage; Sin) adds to these another title (published earlier this year in the U. You have to accept either as a possibility to become completely absorbed in Damage by Josephine Hart.She was a Director of Haymarket Publishing and founded Gallery Poets before going on to produce a number of West End plays. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved, or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock or recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Portrait of an obsession … Juliette Bincohe and Jeremy Irons in Damage, directed by Louis Malle (1992). It’s the story of Stephen Fleming, a man who seemingly has everything – wealth, a beautiful wife (Ingrid), two children (Martyn and Sally), and a prestigious political career in Parliament.