Guy and Carlie are married with a child. They met on their first day at university and share a past together that includes the knowledge that Carlie once tried to commit suicide over her ex-lover, Magnus. Now, many years later, Carlie has received a message from Magnus via the website Blast From The Past - a fact she chooses to keep secret from Guy.
This novel is about faith and trust, suspicion and insidious doubt. And lies. Guy becomes obsessed with trying to catch Carlie out – checking her computer for messages; following her and spying on her in the park – and in doing so becomes the agent of his own unhappiness. The story is written very much as a Greek tragedy (in fact in the first half of the book, Guy is a Greek scholar and there are plenty of references to Greek literature for those who wish to look for them) with Guy as the flawed hero and author of his own downfall.
The prose – particularly in the first part of the book – is mesmerising with the characters deeply and engagingly drawn. Penelope Evans explores the pain and anguish of finding a place in the world as the young Guy and Carlie try to mould themselves into people who can love and be loved and fit into the society they find around them. Guy is self-contained and worldly-wise; Carlie is open and vulnerable. Guy makes it his business both to love Carlie and to look after her as she hurtles into experiencing every single moment of her life with an intensity that leaves her exhausted and panicky. But Guy is always there to save her from herself.
He tries to do the same thing when Magnus comes back into their lives but with much less success. Driven by their own demons and wrapped in their individual need to find themselves again, Guy and Carlie each attempt to slay the ghosts of the past. There is a powerful inevitability of it all as they dance around the truth of what their actions are doing to their relationship but the layers of Guy’s obsessive thoughts becomes, for me, just a little claustrophobic.
This is an elegantly written book, full of insights into love and desperation
and the small secrets we keep that grow in the dark to change our lives; a psychological
exploration of obsession and the futility of trying to recapture who we once
were. Compulsive reading.
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Ruth Wade
Penelope Evans’s first 2 novels were The Lost Girl and Freezing.