When I picked up the book, I instantly painted in my mind a landscape of blood, knives, kalashnikov, fashionistas, conniving wives, erotic love making, bang-bang, intense conversations and cars racing and zipping through dimly lit, deserted streets. Though the story did greet a few elements from my imaginative world, a few others remained missing in this story that comes across as a thriller initially. The suspense and some characters like Carmichael, Flora, Walter Wells, Ross kept me intrigued to read on till the end. However, a few incidents in the story were redundant, which made it a tad drag (for example, Grace mowing down Doris in her Jaguar; how young Grace grew when she entered into a relationship with Walter Wells; that Ross was plump and had to review his weight every Friday). Also, I just could not get my mind around why Grace's youthful and supple skin (thanks to the innumerable sessions of intercourse with her young artist lover and the happiness she derived from his company) was made such a great deal that she was taken to a Chinese herbal clinic and a nun; even a cosmetic surgeon suspected her to be a spy/impostor. But that's the writer's imagination, which I would not like to question further, but silently move on. Oh, and, it would have been really cool if the stalker (revealed towards the end) was somebody from Grace-Barely's past. Anyway, overall, it was a well-imagined and enrapturing story, warts and all.
It was this book that put me off reading Fay Weldon. I was becoming disenchanted anyway, she seemed to have moved on from wicked black humour to bitterness, but when she succumbed to payment for product placement in this novel, I no longer felt as if I could trust her as a commentator on contemporary life. Sad really, because I had read almost everything she had written, starting with Life and Loves of a She-devil and reading everything else I could get hands on, buying it when it was affordable or borrowing it from the library when it wasn't.
