This is a saga of escape, gambling, coincidence, disappearances and overwhelming love. It spans the middle of the century and tells of Catherine Hammond, born in Aquae Regis, and her growing up in London during the fifties.
Ronald Frame was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1953, and educated there and at Oxford. He is the author of thirteen internationally published works of fiction, is an award-winning television and radio scriptwriter, and has recently received international recognition for his short stories set in the fictitious Scottish spa town of Carnbeg.
In 1984 he was joint-winner of the first Betty Trask Prize for fiction. In 1999 his novel The Lantern Bearers was longlisted for The Man Booker Prize and won the 2000 Saltire Award for Scottish Book of the Year.
In August 2001 he delivered the inaugural Saltire Lecture at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which received wide press coverage. He spoke at the New York Public Library in late October 2001 following appearances at the Toronto International Festival of Authors. The American Library Association named Ronald Frame as winner of the Barbara Gittings Honor Award in Fiction for 2003.
I had to force myself through the last 200 pages of this book just to prove to myself that it deserves a one star rating. It's pretentious beyond endurance, with the plot lifted straight from "Forever Amber" and leaden, self absorbed "philosophical" prose.
Our heroine hops from bed to bed, forms an odd friendship here and there,- all of it told in the cryptic, mystical language, through the series of badly connected chapters.
And then she discovers that the man she was loved and abandoned by, Bruce.....oops Maurice, had to leave her because of a monstrous secret (not going to spoil that one for you, but you can guess that it was lifted straight out of a cheap soap opera).
And then there are sex scenes. Catherine has to staunch the desire in her womb with a candle. She and her lover explode in orgasm that covers them in their juices and excrement. Exciting stuff. Only no amount of corpophilia makes up for a crap book.