The situation comes straight from the world of Victorian pornography. The narrator, an English paterfamilias and Tory M.P., leads a passionless existence until he meets his son’s fiancee with whom he becomes erotically enthralled. She, at least, keeps her cool. All-in-the-family sex is nothing new to her: her affair with her teenage brother prompted his suicide. “I tried to soothe him with my body,” she reports. “Semen and tears are the symbols of the night.” You might think our agitated M.P. would be alarmed by such language, but he’s too busy inventing missed maxims of his own. “Elliptical intimacy is the marriage vow of good companions,” he observes, and later: “London is no place for death.” La Rochefoucauld, call home.
The woman announces that she will marry the M.P.’s son yet continue to service the father. Here the heavy breathing isn’t in the details, it’s in the prose: “For hours, we had fought a battle with the barricades of the body.” It would have been a kindness had Hart’s editor reminded her that we don’t battle barricades, but the people behind them. Well, no one ever said sexual obsession was easy to write about - which is why Dickens, after much thought, decided not to write “Great Expectations” from Miss Havisham’s point of view. Yet “Damage,” with all its windy pronouncements on the human condition, will sell. It’s just the book for readers who wouldn’t be caught on the subway with “Mistress Whippingham’s Academy.”
