"A sleek spire of gleaming sapphire that pierced the clouds – I knew from my previous interviews that the interior on the other side of the ornate copper-framed revolving doors was just as awe-inspiring, with golden-veined marble floors and walls and brushed-aluminium security desk and turnstiles." Yes, yes, YES!īut soon she's sprawling on the floor of the lobby, looking up at a man with A Firmly Etched Mouth, A Blade Of A Nose and Intensely Blue Eyes – which quickly Bored Into Me, of course.
For one moment, when she sees the building where she will be working, I had hopes that she might be one of these people one reads about in the popular press, who fall in love with inanimate objects and can be found boasting of their imminent marriage to the Statue of Liberty or a rollercoaster. This is all before the heroine starts her first day at One Of The Preeminent Advertising Agencies In The United States. Thus in the space of the first four pages, people have Winning Smiles, Grin Like Idiots and Never Waver From Their Determination.
The writing is standard Mills & Boon drivel, several levels beneath your average competent chick-lit, the banality of which is hard to convey without resorting to the use of Patrick Hamilton's "Komic Kapitals", a stylistic flourish used by the great man when mocking platitudes. I, however, was offended by this book, which its publishers claim has "outstripped" Fifty Shades of Grey after selling more than 50,000 paperback copies in its first week, right from page one, long before any sexual shenanigans started.
And it does seem a rather grotesque phenomenon to occur just as we are becoming fully aware of the many crimes of forced marriage, torture and "honour" killing against women who want only to be free. M any feminists find the latest strand of erotica (horrible word: like putting a crocheted crinoline lady on a lavatory roll), in which women fetishise their own powerlessness, offensive.
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