Justine - Hardcover

Alice Thompson was born and brought up in Edinburgh. She was the former keyboard player with post-punk eighties band, The Woodentops and joint winner with Graham Swift of The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for her first novel, Justine. Her second novel, Pandora's Box, was shortlisted for The Stakis Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. Her other novels are Pharos, The Falconer and most recently Burnt Island. Alice is a past winner of a Creative Scotland Award. She is now lecturer in Creative Writing at Edinburgh University.

Scottish writer Thompsons second outing is her first hereand while some will groan at its jejune, vapid, imitative clunkiness, others will be smitten by its psycho-feminist puzzlings and probings. With debts to Henry James, Oscar Wilde, the Marquis de Sade, etc., etc., etc., Thompson takes a nameless and reclusive hyper-aesthete, makes him god-like of face and club of foot, surrounds him with glorious objets dart in his Kensington Gardens flat, and has him fall passionately in lovewith a portrait on the wall. Whether hes in love with the real Justine or the ideal Justine of the portrait, whether he loves the woman or wants to own her, remain (as theyve long, long had a way of doing) central to the mysteries, mazes, dreams, terrors, and tortures that follow, with an outcome that readers will have to find out for themselves. Our narrator, though, thinking himself divinely blessed by the fate of being spoken to by the real Justine in the stacks of a library ( Why me? Because of your face. It is like Michelangelos Adam reaching out to God ), ends up tricked, then tricked and tricked again not only by Justine but by Justines twin sister Juliette, even to the point of committing a murder (uh-huh, its very, very, very gory) in order to save Justine from a murderer of her ownthough from then on, things go badly indeed for Narrator, who will follow mazes and enter houses hes seen in dreams, find himself behind bars, lose his club foot, and... But one mustnt tell too much. Admittedly, there are brief moments, especially near the end, of psychological interest, mystery, even a certain penetration, though the road to them is well paved with banality (However, I could hardly take what she was telling me seriouslyit read like something out of a bad detective novel). For those, only, who like their mind- and gender-teasers in novel form. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.