Olivia Glazebrook’s first novel begins with a disaster.
Olivia Glazebrook’s first novel begins with a disaster. Kit, painter of meretricious society portraits, has whisked Alice, his younger, pregnant girlfriend, off to Jordan for an indulgent weekend. Their car skids off a mountain road leaving Alice trapped inside. Kit behaves like an unheroic imperialist. ‘You bloody little man, Karim!’, he yells at the driver, but it is Karim who reminds him that they ought to be aiding Alice. They are rescued, but not all the artifice of a luxury hotel can prevent Alice’s miscarriage. Blood pours out of her ‘as if she were a vase, carelessly knocked over on a table.’
Glazebrook is good with similes. The image of the vase mirrors the impact on their relationship of the loss of the unborn ‘Bean’. The shape of their shared life is broken; meaning collapses, and the rich, handsome couple are stranded in an emotional wasteland more sterile than the Jordanian desert.
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