‘I’m concerned that an experience like that could complicate things,” Julian says to his girlfriend Emma early on in Melbourne-based Amy Taylor’s second novel, Ruins.
The experience he is referring to is a threesome Emma is urging him to participate in, with a young Greek woman called Lena. It’s no spoiler to say that Julian gives in and, yes, things get very complicated.
The two 30-something Londoners are spending a stultifyingly hot summer in Athens, staying in an elegant, centrally located flat lent to them by a friend of the well-connected Julian. Julian is an academic working on a research paper in the city library, while Emma explores the noisy, bustling streets, treating each walk “with the same respect she would give an occupation”.
Emma had a miscarriage in London and immediately afterwards left her advertising job, apparently on a whim. Julian thinks she is grieving the miscarriage, but she’s secretly relieved, hoping that she and Julian can now “throw themselves into new experiences” instead of settling down.
During one of her walks, Emma ducks into a random bar for a drink, encountering and being immediately charmed by pretty young barmaid Lena. Emma engineers for Lena to meet Julian and, once he agrees, the three-sided affair begins.
It goes as wrong as you would expect it to, but, at first, it goes wrong slowly and tensely. Julian especially is a ridiculous person to be engaging in something so potentially destabilising. He loves Emma in a helpless sort of way and is almost insanely obsessed with his academic reputation and his work, which is going nowhere.
“For years Julian’s research paper had provided him with a … sense of hope which he’d hung upon its unknown – and therefore unlimited potential … so much of his time – his precious youth! – to the endeavour that he felt obliged to return to uselessly … waging a war against himself.” Julian comes from a cold, posh, wealthy family – we get some tantalising snippets of back story – where, unsurprisingly, love was conditional upon success.
Emma is harder to read. Somewhat dreamy and melancholic, but with a practised social mask, she has seen her friends’ careers falter once they have children and she doesn’t want motherhood to “just happen” to her – as it did to her own (in her view) too-passive mother. She’s not, however, particularly ambitious. Although things eventually change for her professionally, they do so by chance and for most of the novel she’s content to wander the streets of Athens, read Medea, and choreograph the threesome.
The arrangement with Lena gets especially tricky when her real life – the Greek one she lives outside of the threesome – starts to spill over into Julian and Emma’s privileged life. The last third of the book speeds up as events start to spiral out of the English couple’s control.
Emma and Julian are entitled, self-obsessed and often unlikeable, but they’re complex and we are shown their point of view, which allows us to feel greater sympathy for them. The Greek characters are more broadly drawn. It would have been good to have more nuance there, especially in Lena. For the most part, Lena seems more like a child than a 22-year-old, swinging from malleable to stubborn.
The squares, cafes and bars of Athens are brought to vivid, rambunctious life and Emma and Julian, however annoying at times, also feel real. The ending includes a dramatic twist and a fitting conclusion for the two main characters. Deeper and more memorable than the noirish beach read the cover suggests, Ruins is an immersive page-turner.
Ruins, by Amy Taylor (Allen & Unwin, $36.99), is out now.
