14.02.2025 (1): Hide and Seek
Feb. 14th, 2025 08:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunshowerdandelionI really, really enjoyed this novel. There was enough subtlety and very pointed observations about love that the characters felt very human, and there was enough of a plot-spine that I kept reading and wanting to know what came next. The whole thing was sordid and sad, but not in a high-pitched wail sort of way: the emotions were kept at a normal register and the prose is so pitch-perfect, so writerly and yet so grounded, that I wasn't borne off my seat (in a bad way).
What I enjoyed most were the moments of relatively uncomplicated love: Harriet sums them up pretty nicely at the end, and I was able (due to the very close prose - an achievement given that Mrs. Taylor slips into different perspectives all the time) to really embody her. Mrs. Taylor's prose elegantly slows when Harriet's perception slows, and Harriet is given to random flitters of attention that I can recognize very clearly in myself. And again those moments are rendered very beautifully - as I've written about, I loved the moment where Vesey bandages Harriet's arm, and also their meeting in the fog (which - there's a sort of mini-motif of them being enisled, cut off from everyone) which I loved absolutely. I also loved Harriet's last significant meeting with Vesey, at a run-down motel of sorts, their little affair, and how Harriet very sadly wishes for a return to an uncomplicated youth. I think the big theme is of youth as arcadia, but the novel was grounded enough that even death exists in arcadia.
I also found myself warming to the characters. Harriet I liked from the start - I didn't love her, but I could feel her, her existence as a character was very strong and her muddle is a muddle I can inhabit, also being a conventional person. Vesey I definitely warmed up to. In the beginning, I read him as a defensive man, which I'm sure is the default model of men nowadays; but then the more I read, the more he showed his love to Harriet, and the more life beat him down. It was like an elevator thing: I eventually met him halfway.
The prose is very packed but very graceful. Mrs. Taylor at the height of her powers here, nothing stormy or rhythmic, but a strong current.
In the end, I unintentionally read a trifecta of adultery books, and I absolutely think this book is in conversation with Anita Brookner's A Closed Eye (Anita Brookner also liked Elizabeth Taylor), as both feature the unattainable affair object, travel, and children, and the very specific plot point of a husband threatening a holiday to cut off the woman from her affair, and also brief periods where both the main female characters become shopgirls. I think they can almost be read as AUs of one another: Charles in here is rather benign, whereas the husband in A Closed Eye acted in a very damaging way; and the focus of A Closed Eye was in a more general desire to have volition and freedom, whereas this one focused more on love. I found that sort of conversation very interesting, as both yielded different insights. Also, the characters in A Closed Eye were richer (very Brooknerian), but A Game of Hide and Seek features a Brooknerian character in Julia - although Brookner, I think, would render her a little more sympathetically.
I got misty over the sordid little affair rendezvous both characters procured towards the end. I felt that, genuinely. And also their breastplates of irony and bitter humor denting and then falling off. Really looking forward to reading her short stories.
What I enjoyed most were the moments of relatively uncomplicated love: Harriet sums them up pretty nicely at the end, and I was able (due to the very close prose - an achievement given that Mrs. Taylor slips into different perspectives all the time) to really embody her. Mrs. Taylor's prose elegantly slows when Harriet's perception slows, and Harriet is given to random flitters of attention that I can recognize very clearly in myself. And again those moments are rendered very beautifully - as I've written about, I loved the moment where Vesey bandages Harriet's arm, and also their meeting in the fog (which - there's a sort of mini-motif of them being enisled, cut off from everyone) which I loved absolutely. I also loved Harriet's last significant meeting with Vesey, at a run-down motel of sorts, their little affair, and how Harriet very sadly wishes for a return to an uncomplicated youth. I think the big theme is of youth as arcadia, but the novel was grounded enough that even death exists in arcadia.
I also found myself warming to the characters. Harriet I liked from the start - I didn't love her, but I could feel her, her existence as a character was very strong and her muddle is a muddle I can inhabit, also being a conventional person. Vesey I definitely warmed up to. In the beginning, I read him as a defensive man, which I'm sure is the default model of men nowadays; but then the more I read, the more he showed his love to Harriet, and the more life beat him down. It was like an elevator thing: I eventually met him halfway.
The prose is very packed but very graceful. Mrs. Taylor at the height of her powers here, nothing stormy or rhythmic, but a strong current.
In the end, I unintentionally read a trifecta of adultery books, and I absolutely think this book is in conversation with Anita Brookner's A Closed Eye (Anita Brookner also liked Elizabeth Taylor), as both feature the unattainable affair object, travel, and children, and the very specific plot point of a husband threatening a holiday to cut off the woman from her affair, and also brief periods where both the main female characters become shopgirls. I think they can almost be read as AUs of one another: Charles in here is rather benign, whereas the husband in A Closed Eye acted in a very damaging way; and the focus of A Closed Eye was in a more general desire to have volition and freedom, whereas this one focused more on love. I found that sort of conversation very interesting, as both yielded different insights. Also, the characters in A Closed Eye were richer (very Brooknerian), but A Game of Hide and Seek features a Brooknerian character in Julia - although Brookner, I think, would render her a little more sympathetically.
I got misty over the sordid little affair rendezvous both characters procured towards the end. I felt that, genuinely. And also their breastplates of irony and bitter humor denting and then falling off. Really looking forward to reading her short stories.
