A MOMENT OF LIFE

In Mahdjik’s debut novel, two Victorian spouses warm up to each other within the strictures of their arranged marriage.

Lord Albert Granville and his wife, Lady Helen, have been married for two months, but they really don’t know each other. Their marriage was arranged, and Albert assumes Helen only married him because she was forced to do so by her merchant father. Albert, for his part, married Helen in order to salvage some respectability for his family after an affair derailed his previous engagement. Since the wedding, they’ve dined separately, slept in separate rooms, and barely exchanged a word. It is only when Helen sprains her ankle while horseback riding and is cooped up in the house that Albert finally begins to pay her some attention. Some light joking leads to the realization that the two have much in common—both were raised by surrogate mothers after their real mothers died when they were young—and share some sexual chemistry. An afternoon of conversation slowly upends everything that each believed about the other, and the promise of an upcoming ball provides an opportunity for a true romance to blossom. Is it possible that these two people might find real love in their transactional Victorian marriage? The author’s prose is sharp and attentive, documenting the slow build of attraction between Albert and Helen in the context of 19th-century formality: “[O]ne always needed a lot of imagination to merely guess what the legs and thighs of a lady might look like under all those slips and petticoats. That was why a mere glance at the calves of his wife aroused great excitement in Albert, an excitement that he was barely able to restrain.” Despite its romantic subject matter, the short novel is essentially a philosophical dialogue, growing increasingly allegorical (and tedious) as it goes along. Its didacticism and lack of plot complexity make the reader thirst for a real Victorian novel, one offering a more variegated view of love than this slim work.

An initially intriguing but ultimately unremarkable novel about love and marriage.