Entanglement to decipher

The Confessions Of Edward Day by Valerie Martin (Weidenfeld & Nicolson $37.99)

There can be few pleasures greater than tucking into a novel written by an author who not only respects your intelligence, but insists you use it. Such is The Confessions of Edward Day, the latest terrific novel by versatile American writer Valerie Martin, best-known for Property, which won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2003.

From the outset — indeed, right from the epigraph from Shakespeare that precedes the text ("False face must hide what the false heart doth know") — three possibilities are held in tension, and the reader turns the pages with eyes pleading for a crumb of truth amongst all the ambiguity.

It's not until 255 pages in that the clincher finally seems to have arrived. The mystery at the heart of the novel is the character of Edward Day, an aspiring young New York actor, who meets and takes an interest in the lovely, talented Madeleine Delavergne, but seems to have a rival for her affections in the morose figure of Guy Margate, who also happens to be a bit of a ringer for Edward himself.

When Edward goes for a midnight stroll on the pier and manages to fall into the tide, it's Guy who is fortuitously there to rescue him. From that moment onward, their fates are entwined, after a vaguely Dorian Gray fashion. The entanglement begins with Guy chiselling 50 bucks out of Edward as a token of his gratitude, but it by no means ends with occasional requests for money.

There's the triangular arrangement with Madeleine at its apex to start with, and there's professional rivalry as their respective careers take off. Events, and images of the other characters, all reach us selected and refracted through the prism of Edward Day's recollection, as the novel purports to be his memoir, written in the present looking back.

It's clear that he is far from reliable — he's an accomplished dissembler, after all, as all actors are. Is Guy really the faintly malevolent stalker that Edward paints him to be? Or is he the hapless and rather pathetic recipient of an astonishing run of bad luck, and of the ungrateful disfavour of Edward? And what of Madeleine? Whom does she love — Guy, whom she eventually marries, or Edward, whom she's happy to bonk on a casual basis when chance arises?

Is she the proxy for the petty jealousies and antagonism of Edward and Guy, or is she controlling and manipulating both men to her own ends? Where should our sympathies lie when the whole unhealthy situation ends? And what hope do we have of knowing for sure, when the other epigraph is from Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares: "Our ... attention is not sufficiently far-reaching to carry out the process of penetrating another person's soul."

In the hands of a master storyteller such as Martin, what fun it is to try.

* John McCrystal is a Wellington writer.