Books & Poetry

With a plot that turns on adultery and betrayal, and characters who are almost exclusively wealthy and beautiful, you would be forgiven for thinking that this is a fat slice of airport escapism. But Andrea Lee’s slim novel is trying to be subtler than its appearance would suggest.

Mira and Nick, a young couple, move to Rome in the mid-1980s. She’s black, he’s a Wasp; both are well educated and attractive. But Mira lets the snake into their Eden when, on a whim, she gives her number to an Italian billionaire, the wolfish Zenin, and begins an affair with him. Twenty years later, the three protagonists remember this infidelity and reflect on the insidious, unpredictable ways it has affected them. Nick has never forgiven Mira, while Zenin, despite his legions of lovers, has never forgotten her. Mira is supposed to have lost some crucial part of herself when she cheated on a man she loved with one she didn’t, although seeing as she has a successful career, a happy second marriage and a home in an Italian castle, the price of her sin does not seem particularly high. Subverting the reflections of these three ‘lost hearts’ is a Greek chorus of secondary characters: waiters, neighbours, colleagues, offering their own brief observations of the protagonists.

Lee is trying to turn a fairly commonplace situation into an epic tale of grand passion – a battle between youth and experience, the new world and the old. But it’s all curiously bloodless, with the constantly shifting viewpoints making the action seem rather distant and remote. And despite Lea’s admirably sparse and stylish prose, the book is cluttered with admiring descriptions of wealth. This gives it the feel of a magazine: moody, atmospheric, fun to flick through, but ultimately shallow.