GENRE: Contemporary Fiction
SETTING: England
WIKI: link
FILM: link
BOOK GRADE: D
FILM GRADE: C
SYNOPSIS: He was a married M.P. with two grown children. On the surface, his life was what he wanted it to be. She was his son's fiancee, a shattered woman who had only known forbidden love. When they meet, their attraction is instantaneous, their obsession complete. And nothing, it seems, can tear them away from each other and their dangerous, damaging, illicit passion....
MY THOUGHTS: This book was a snoozefest and comes in at only 198 pages. The story spans four months then in the last chapter, it's three years later. It had so much potential based on the very interesting synopsis but was lacking so much information. We don't even know how the fifty-year old main male protagonist, who isn't even given a name (but is named Stephen in the film) starts his affair with Anna, his twenty-five-year-old son Martyn's thirty-three-year-old girlfriend. How'd they go from meeting each other to a full-blown affair? It wasn't said. She's the only one who had any backstory but she's not the one I wanted any on. The whole story is poorly written and very condensed. Author seemed detached from the characters she created and gave them no personality.
Anna, a self-professed "damaged" person, was supposed to seem mysterious but wasn't. The one part of her background we learned was far-fetched and pointless. We didn't need her stepfather in the book either. Words spent on him should have been spent on developing Anna's character. Why were we given so much backstory on the main male character's father Tom but not on him? His daughter Sally was barely in this so why create her character at all? We're told the main character is obsessed with Anna but I never felt he was. And I never saw any obsession coming from Anna either.
Despite the subject matter, this novel isn't really explicit.
FILM: In the film, from 1992, Sally's a young teen while in the book she's an adult, just two years younger than Martyn. In the film Stephen tells Anna at one point that he doesn't want to see her anymore but that doesn't happen in the novel. In the novel Anna is a journalist who met Martyn at work but in the film, she works for a famous auction company, Sotheby's. There's a few other unimportant differences between book and film. The film isn't good but it's a little better than the novel. I like that you can actually see Stephen's emotions on his face when he's with Anna.
There's a couple brief scenes of bare breasts toward the end, and Jeremy Iron's butt and full frontal nudity with him. The version I saw didn't have his nude genitals in it.
There's a scene in the film when Stephen answers the phone and there's a book right next to it. It's Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, with this cover.
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