Book review: The Lovers

A SPIDER'S thread of anxiety, twitching and shivering, links every drop of sweated worry in Vendela Vida's absorbing third novel. On the novel's opening page Yvonne, its heroine, a 53-year-old widow from Vermont, seems all washed up - she has somewhere to go, yet no means of getting there.

THE LOVERS

BY VENDELA VIDA

Atlantic Books, 228pp, 14.99

Her car from Dalaman airport to her Turkish holiday villa in the tiny village of Datca has failed to show. Mr Celik, the villa's owner, has arranged it. Has Yvonne been scammed? Is Mr Celik less than he seems?

This question persists many pages later, Yvonne by now settled into her holiday, when cosmetics model Ozlem, Mr Celik's wife, turns up unannounced, to confide that the villa is the abode of Mr Celik's mistress.

The village of Datca, where Yvonne and Peter had honeymooned decades earlier, is now dirty and run down. Her visit, it seems, is an attempt to somehow recover Peter in spirit. But instead her mind floods with thoughts of their grown-up twins, Aurelia and Matthew, and of their heartbreak when Aurelia, mired in drug abuse and waywardness, caused great pain for all the family. Yvonne's grand plan for a restorative week in Turkey seems on the skids.

Vendela Vida beautifully summons Yvonne's sense of helpless foreignness, her competing needs and instincts - her wish to befriend the complaining Ozlem being at odds with Yvonne's censure of Ozlem's behaviour when the latter reveals she is pregnant and has a lover, a married man in Istanbul.

Yet Yvonne is charmed by Ozlem's frankness, and confides her own family troubles; she remembers Peter's jealousy once, when a student at Yvonne's college had taken a shine to her. But now, at 53, she feels invisible, on the farther shores of romantic possibility.

To escape the doldrums of Datca, she drives to Knidos, a bayside village and place of good memories, and recovers her equilibrium. Stunning landscapes and honeyed sunlight lift her mood, and while the writing is never romanticised nor tempted into the clichs of bad travelogue, there are some soft, rather quaint passages: "She was pleased that she would be spending the day here (at Knidos] rather than in Datca. More than pleased… she was proud of the road for leading her here. Knidos contained all the beauty of worlds old and new."

Being "proud of the road" (in what sense, one wonders?) for getting her there soon gives way to fresh encounters. A promising friendship begins with gullet owner Deniz, who suggests a day's sailing. But, more significantly, a relationship of (mostly unspoken) empathy flowers with Ahmet, a lonely local boy who sells seashells, and takes great risks, causing Yvonne to suffer agonies when he disappears for minutes beneath the waves.

The earlier pains of parenting flood back to her, and some of the finest passages of character exploration ensue in her phases of recollection - her first unlikely meeting with Peter, brought about by Yvonne's stealth; their becoming lovers, the raising of children.

Vida is excellent at evoking piquant moments, at finding the right, arresting phrase - as, for instance, when Yvonne awakes in the villa feeling foul, "the heavy wine (from the night before] having coursed through her blood". "Her skin," writes Vida, "smelled like old armour" - which perfectly captures the sense of Yvonne's spent will, but also subtly alludes to the toll of battles fought and the weight of life's losses.

Vida moves her character forward from troubling anxiety - briefly relieved by these new acquaintances - into high drama: a tragic accident occurs, and Yvonne plays a part in it. Being Yvonne, with her burden of angst, she blames herself fully, seeking punishment to expiate her sense of guilt, and the closing quarter of the book becomes too protracted.

It charts Yvonne's journey in search of release, but from a reader's perspective, it suffers from Vida's book-long strategy of conveying the story's events through the single lens of Yvonne's experience. The eye of the prose never leaves her, which is a problem because Yvonne, though fraught and complex, is insufficiently arresting to sustain the intensive scrutiny.

This flaw is laid bare at the end when Vida drums up a dramatic storm to conjure a rapturous epiphany. But her character disappears inside the effects. Emotion builds. It's a case of too much, yet not enough. And the book lacks a final, convincing full stop.