Selling sex up the river

Anne Enright is an Irish writer with a startling gift for domesticating the outlandish. In her last novel, about twins separated at birth, she explored the sadness at the heart of tales of freakish sameness. In her latest, based on the true story of a 19th-century Irish concubine, deranged appetites are passed off as endearing peccadilloes.

The novel opens like an arty French film, with some rhythmic coupling in a Paris flat. Eliza Lynch, an 18-year-old beauty with a chronic clothes habit and a pragmatically carnal relationship with her dressmaker, is intent on pleasuring Francisco Solano Lopez, a visiting South American with absurd manners and extravagant tastes. He is the heir-apparent to the dictatorship of Paraguay, she is a black-eyed hussy on the run from a prudent marriage. When she meets Lopez money ‘was running through her hands like water. She tried to catch it, hold it: clutched instead at his neck, or his throat, or his mouth’.