Reverting to type

While I was living in Tokyo, a Japanese girl friend of mine fell in love with a British investment banker. After promising marriage, he abandoned her for an English wife from the counties. But my girl friend was no Madame Butterfly. She did not attempt suicide. She felt she had had a lucky escape. A visit to Wiltshire to meet his family had convinced her the English upper classes were mad. Emerging from her room on Sunday evening, she discovered her lover’s father polishing the family shoes. She rang me in shock. Did he suffer from some kind of foot fetish? she asked. I explained that men of that generation who had been to public school and then the army frequently got out the shoe box on a Sunday evening. My girl friend remained sceptical, ‘Well I am keeping my shoes locked up’, she said firmly, ‘I don’t want them molested.’ Her lover did not find this funny. She had stepped outside her Madame Butterfly role. She was laughing at him.

Butterfly’s Shadow, the new novel by Lee Langley, also centres around a Madame Butterfly and takes for its starting point Puccini’s opera. And that is the problem. Strip away the ravishing music and what you have left is a male fantasy. There is nothing wrong with male fantasies — in their place. But that place is not a novel which depends on character to engage. Male fantasies centre on stereotypes — the schoolgirl, the nurse or, as here, the docile Oriental woman. Too much personality and humour, like my Japanese girl friend displayed, and the fantasy deflates.