The Love Hexagon - Taschenbuch

If you're looking for a novel that is absolutely in touch with the spirit and feeling of the age--and, particularly, what it means to be young and struggling in the sexual jungle of a big city--then William Sutcliffe's funny and affecting The Love Hexagon should definitely be on your bedside table. The adjectives of praise have been flying thick and fast for this immensely readable novel, and it's a mark of Sutcliffe's skill that the 200-odd pages pass with the speed of a short story.

Sutcliffe deals with six young Londoners: three men and three women. All are somehow unsatisfied with their lives, but none of them are able to articulate quite what it is they are looking for. As a game of sexual musical chairs develops and a variety of lusts and betrayals both create and destroy relationships, we get to know Sutcliffe's sharply-drawn protagonists very well. We are even allowed to change our minds about them--something that is not common, even in novels considerably longer and more sombre than this. From the first conversation between Guy and Lisa (the first couple we meet), in which everything from omelettes to the voiceovers in Goodfellas are up for discussion, through a pub argument on the advantages of having sex with older women, Sutcliffe has our attention nailed to his quirky narrative. Although the requisite scene-setting is handled with equal adroitness (such as the offices of the struggling independent TV company Elemental Productions, for which Lisa and Josh, another participant in the La Ronde style erotic shenanigans, work), Sutcliffe's real strength is in the dialogue, such as Guy and his friend Graham discussing sex: "The way she did it was incredible." "Why? What did she do?" "It wasn't what she did--it was how she did it. She is ... like ... older." "Older than what?" "Than us." "She's older? This is what you find so horny? That she's old?" "Not really old--it's not a necrophilia thing. She's just ... like ... 40 or something. Well-preserved. She's mature. I tell you, she makes Zoe seem like a baby. In every way. I mean--people our age are ... are just ... there's nothing to us. All we've got going for us is the fact that we haven't yet gone wrinkly." --Barry Forshaw