Enough sex to turn penguins purple

Press, 19 April 1986, Page 20

Enough sex to turn penguins purple

Tantalus. By Amanda Hemingway. Penguin, 1984. 319 pp. $8.95 (paperback). Bliss. By Jill Tweedie. Penuin, 1985. 396 pp. $8.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Margaret Burrell) The Penguin publishing house needs a new logo for paperbacks like these; instead of the small orange penguin it should have one of bright purple. “Tantalus” is prefaced by the author reminding us of the fate of Tantalus in Greek myth: for his crimes he was obliged to stand forever in a pool of water which receded as he bent to drink, surrounded by trees laden with delicious fruit just out of reach. His crime, which the author omits to mention, is that he stole the divine food of the gods, nectar and ambrosia, and served them to his merely mortal friends. Compounding this crime he then invited the Olympian gods to a feast at which he served up his butchered son. For these two crimes he has been condemned to everlasting torment. At a superficial level this book seems a mere compendium of sexual deviance; a kind of field-guide to Freud. The heroine has an unresolved Oedipal complex; thwarted of love from her secretly homosexual father, she commits incent with a half-brother watched by the slyly prying eyes of their step-sister. There are suicides, a

murder, and graphic accounts of sodomy with latent overtones of sadomasochism. Yet despite this sordid list the book is cleverly written and after all, no worse than the accounts of the Greek gods and demi-gods contemporaneous with Tantalus. Caroline, the heroine, seeks revenge for the death of her half-brother for which she blames her father, and seeks while on holiday to enlist the help of a venal bi-sexual Greek named Ulysses. He fulfills her requirements and in the best Greek tradition, their punishment and reward will be each other, each desiring exactly what the other cannot give. The second book is more memorable. As a novel it is a curious blend of styles from an author perhaps best known for her “Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist.” It begins with a heroine straight from Nancy Mitford via Barbara Cartland: Lady Clare La Fontaine has everything; money, title, incredible beauty and a brittle line of sophisticated chat. She meets and is pursued relentlessly by the stiffly handsome ruler of an obscure South American country called Ventura. “No man had ever behaved towards her as Raul behaved with that deadly combination of courtesy and threat that held her in a kind of thrall . . .” He bores her rigid but showers her with gifts, and since her mildly eccentric parents have little available

money, she marries him. On discovering she is not a virgin, his adoration of his bride, “La Dorada” as he calls her, veers to contempt and he abuses her, beginning the book’s repeated theme of the degradation and subjugation of women at the hands of corrupt and greedy men. The middle section of the book is set in Ventura, a steamy, squalid country threatened by the fetid lushness of the jungle (Somerset Maugham?), the “Bliss” of the ironic title. Raul plots a revenge on his feckless wife who, in a bid to prevent boredom, seeks to find ways to improve the lot of the Venturan women. Raul’s revenge succeeds, but brings him little satisfaction. His nemesis is not Greek, but native to his own country as the preface has already forewarned. Despite the jacket blurb of acclaim, this book is disturbing. It chronicles events in the lives of four main women; Clare, La Dorada de Ventura, Conchita her maid, Judith, a bitchy quasi-feminist journalist and Alice, a simple country girl beautiful of body, but scarred of face who is lured pregnant to the city by her amoral lover. Their lives become unwittingly interwoven and the craft of this novel is good. But it is marred by its own didacticism: the women are all so appallingly passive. The book pulsates with purple passages of frenzied grapplings and moist thighs, and the only initiative the women seem capable of is sexual. Attempts by any of them to escape their limited roles end in disaster. By the end of the book, the denouement of which is appropriately revealed in the hot-houses of Kew gardens, two of the women are dead, one has attempted suicide, and one has foolishly set off to her probable death. Definitely by a very faint-hearted feminist.