Brenda Stones
posted 24 September 2007

The experience of handling this little hardback from Harvill Secker is pretty delectable: a dimunitive format, of just 122 generously spaced pages, with a luscious matt laminate cover of alternating panels of cadmium yellow and ultramarine, abutting just over the edge of the flaps to give a pleasing juxtaposition of tones, which represent the author’s fantasies of a blue-doored followed by a yellow-doored secret world… Over the top, I know, but this style of production seems to be a winning formula, when you compare with Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, a similar example of a perfectly formed little novella.

And then you come to the writing. The theme Brink tackles is those dreams you have of an ideal relationship, where you wake with a feeling of having visited another world, an alternative possibility of what might have been… He dares to turn those fantasies into alternative realities, where the hero staggers into a parallel universe of ‘the path not taken’, peopled by the perfect picturebook family who welcome the intruder with unquestioning caresses and cuddles. It’s been done before, of course, this idea of time travelling, as if we need to challenge the constraints on our lives produced by our own sequence of choices.

So does it work? For me it becomes rather odiously self-indulgent, as our hero recounts his relentless conquests of Nelia, Embeth, Lydia and Sarah, two of them white, one black and one brown. My sympathy and interest wore thin as the narrator confessed his regrets at getting stuck with poor childless Lydia, when he could so easily have eloped with Embeth in her come-hither scarlet shoes, or else pursue the enigmatic Sarah with her trophy career as an erotic photographer.

Ultimately it’s just too voyeuristic, to imagine himself with that wife, no that one, or even that one, as we leave him about to open the next door of porno possibilities. The book was first published as a not-for-sale edition to mark the launch of a new imprint of Random House in South Africa. Maybe it should have stayed that way…