Book Review – Damage by Josephine Hart
Damage - Josephine Hart
On the surface, Damage is about a middle-aged man who has an affair with a younger woman. Pretty standard dramatic fare, right? But wait–there’s more. The younger woman in question happens to be his son’s fiancée, and the man in question happens to be a member of Parliament.
There is much more at work here than mere lust, or even mere love. No, it is sexual obsession that dominates this story, an obsession so pervasive that it propels the narrator to unspeakable lows. It propels the narrative toward its tragic conclusion.
Still, it isn’t dramatic excess that packs a punch in this story. It is an eerie and enduring emptiness. These characters are all, on various levels, devoid of humanity. The narrator has traipsed through a loveless fifty years of life, never once experiencing feelings of love or sexual passion until he meets Anna, his son’s newest girlfriend. His wife, Ingrid, seems content with their passionless union and, together, they put on a good show in public. They are both façades.
Martyn has meandered from one relationship to the next with women who vaguely resemble his mother. Anna has dragged multiple men through her psychological mud in a vain attempt to escape her troubled past. Sally, the only remotely functional family member, remains fairly remote throughout the story. Her romantic relationship with Jonathan is the only functional one in the book. Her narrative distance from the rest of her family allows her to transcend their collective emptiness.
We experience this story through the detached eyes of a cold narrator, who engages in some logic-defying mental contortions to justify what he is doing. But there is no escaping the consequences of his disturbing romantic entanglement with Anna. He remains firmly rooted in the delusion that he has found true love, that he can have a domestic life with this young woman. He even assigns himself godlike powers of taking on others’ negative feelings so that they can be free of them–all in the name of assuaging his own vague sense of guilt. At points, he even deflects blame from himself and onto the “devil.”
The writing style lends itself to this inherent emptiness. Sentence fragments and long strains of simple sentences give the story an abrupt, staccato feel. The chapters are short; the story flits from one scene to the next quickly, leaving the reader with impressionistic shards of rising and falling action, rather than a fully realized narrative exploration. We are on a crash course with ruin from the moment we begin reading, and the story takes no detours on its way there.
(Disclaimer: I received a digital galley of this title from Open Road.)
