life-style, amanda craig, the golden rule, crime thriller, melodrama, canberra times book review

British author Amanda Craig is a freelance journalist, literary critic and novelist. In an opinion piece in The Independent, Craig questioned the current obsession with historical fiction while the contemporary novel seems out of fashion. She says she has, in her novels, "set out to take the DNA of a Victorian novel - it's spirit of realism, its strong plot, it's cast of characters who are not passively shaped by circumstances but who rise to challenge or escape them". For Craig, writing contemporary fiction is "a moral duty". As a result, she has written a cycle of eight interconnected novels dealing with contemporary British society, a multi stranded approach to writing fiction. The Golden Rule is the ninth. Each novel stands alone but they are linked by characters. Craig will take a minor character from one of the previous novels and make him or her the protagonist of the next. Hannah, the main character in The Golden Rule, first appeared as a child in A Private Place, the second in the cycle. Hannah is now 29, living in poverty in London, abandoned by her abusive husband, Jake, cleaning houses to support herself and her six-year-old child, Maisy. Hannah is "exhausted by debt, hopelessness, loneliness, anger and the knowledge that, despite having jumped through all the right hoops, the bigger life on which she had pinned her hopes was not going to happen". Jake has applied for divorce and custody of Maisy. "Fury was what kept her going", and hatred of her husband. Hannah grew up in Cornwall but escaped to university, where she met and married Jake. Now her mother is dying and she travels back to St Piran in Cornwall to be with her. On the train, she meets Jinni, elegant and rich, who invites Hannah to join her in First Class. Jinni too is angry and bitter about her husband and their impending divorce. The two women make a pact to murder each other's husband. Hannah is to kill first, as Jinni's husband Con lives in a decaying stately home near St Piran. However Jinni's husband is far from the tall dark good looking man she describes, rather he is "an enormous creature", drunk, ugly and dishevelled, reeking of "stale sweat and a lot of booze". At this point, The Golden Rule morphs from echoes of Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train to Beauty and the Beast, as the novel becomes a romance with elements of gothic melodrama, interspersed with didactic lectures on contemporary issues: Brexit; sexual harassment in the work place; domestic violence; the widening gap between rich and poor and the plight of generation rent who can't afford inflated house prices. The end result, sadly, is repetitive, predictable and at times plain tedious.

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REVIEW

September 19 2020 - 12:00AM

British author Amanda Craig is a freelance journalist, literary critic and novelist. In an opinion piece in The Independent, Craig questioned the current obsession with historical fiction while the contemporary novel seems out of fashion. She says she has, in her novels, "set out to take the DNA of a Victorian novel - it's spirit of realism, its strong plot, it's cast of characters who are not passively shaped by circumstances but who rise to challenge or escape them".

For Craig, writing contemporary fiction is "a moral duty". As a result, she has written a cycle of eight interconnected novels dealing with contemporary British society, a multi stranded approach to writing fiction. The Golden Rule is the ninth.

Each novel stands alone but they are linked by characters. Craig will take a minor character from one of the previous novels and make him or her the protagonist of the next. Hannah, the main character in The Golden Rule, first appeared as a child in A Private Place, the second in the cycle. Hannah is now 29, living in poverty in London, abandoned by her abusive husband, Jake, cleaning houses to support herself and her six-year-old child, Maisy.

Hannah is "exhausted by debt, hopelessness, loneliness, anger and the knowledge that, despite having jumped through all the right hoops, the bigger life on which she had pinned her hopes was not going to happen".

Jake has applied for divorce and custody of Maisy. "Fury was what kept her going", and hatred of her husband.

Hannah grew up in Cornwall but escaped to university, where she met and married Jake. Now her mother is dying and she travels back to St Piran in Cornwall to be with her.

On the train, she meets Jinni, elegant and rich, who invites Hannah to join her in First Class. Jinni too is angry and bitter about her husband and their impending divorce. The two women make a pact to murder each other's husband. Hannah is to kill first, as Jinni's husband Con lives in a decaying stately home near St Piran. However Jinni's husband is far from the tall dark good looking man she describes, rather he is "an enormous creature", drunk, ugly and dishevelled, reeking of "stale sweat and a lot of booze".

At this point, The Golden Rule morphs from echoes of Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train to Beauty and the Beast, as the novel becomes a romance with elements of gothic melodrama, interspersed with didactic lectures on contemporary issues: Brexit; sexual harassment in the work place; domestic violence; the widening gap between rich and poor and the plight of generation rent who can't afford inflated house prices. The end result, sadly, is repetitive, predictable and at times plain tedious.

Continue reading here:

Amanda Craig's The Golden Rule is a modern take on Victorian narrative traditions - The Canberra Times