- Truth and fiction collide when sexual obsession leads to betrayal. A voyage of discovery realigns subject, object and victim - things are not always as they seem.
- She knows this much. Her husband is lying in a coma. He is not expected to recover. She is reeling from the shock of reading his unpublished novella. The text reveals to her a life betrayed. A startling revelation. The story of a man at the end of a loveless marriage. His intensely erotic association with another woman. Fiction and reality have become indistinguishable, and yet she determines to somehow unravel this mystery. Her husband's colleague gave her the manuscript - can he shed any light on the affair?
- Sorel Atherton's relationship with her husband Christopher Houghton seems to be on the brink of recovery after a period of almost total alienation when a telephone call comes from the hospital. Christopher has had a stroke. He is in a coma from which he's not expected to recover. A novella, written by Christopher and given to Sorel by Christopher's friend and university colleague Jeremy Fliszar, tells the story of Avery and Gillian, characters Sorel believes to be closely based on herself and Christopher. The text seems to be a barely disguised account of the breakdown of her relationship with Christopher. The fiction is constructed in the form of Avery's diary:
In provincial France, at a hotel for invalids, Avery and his wife Gillian play out the last days of their loveless marriage. "We have brought our illness to this town of the ill." Avery, silent and withdrawn, is completely self-absorbed; engrossed with his own sexual fantasies and cold with distaste for his relationship with Gillian. In Paris he meets an older woman, Catherine, who becomes the focus for his inchoate longings. Two brief encounters, where mutual attraction is felt but not explored, provide the impetus for an affair in the form of an erotic correspondence. Returning to Melbourne with Gillian, Avery's isolation within their relationship is absolute. He is consumed by the world of sexual fantasy he shares with Catherine, who reveals herself through her letters to be the ideal object of his desire, "a woman whose love expresses itself in total abandon."
Sorel has been completely unaware of Christopher's relationship with Frances, a woman they met in Paris, whom she recognises in the character Catherine. As she reads and her imagination gives shape to the darkly erotic text she feels enthralled, shocked and betrayed. Angered by the suspicion that Christopher's recent unexpected sexual and emotional re-engagement with her must somehow have been attributable to the enlivening effect of his relationship with Frances, she sets out to verify the liaison. As Sorel pieces together what evidence she can add to her own recollections, her instincts about the truth of the fiction seem to be confirmed.
Christopher stares speechless from his death bed. Sorel writes to Frances.
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