The Mistress (2011) commences in Birmingham, England, in 2000 and concludes in 2112, a hundred years into the future. Unusual in its timeframe, with most of the action from 2000 to 2003, and twelve years later in 2015, its title belies the depth of the novel.
Muriel Stent is a thirty-seven year old French and German translator working for Agenor PLC when she begins a relationship with a forty-one year old married pilot, Franz Hausler, a year after they first meet in England. Everyone knows about it: her work colleagues, his work colleagues, his family, and even her mother. Muriel justifies the relationship by saying that Franz is “in the process of separating.” The only one who doesn’t know is Franz’s wife, Rebecca, a laboratory researcher ten years older than her husband. From the first sentence, the reader knows that “this is the story of a man who left his mistress and went back to his wife.” What Muriel doesn’t know is that Rebecca has her own secret.
Agenor is cost-cutting, and the dispensability of translators due to the introduction of an instantaneous translation machine leads to tension in the office, and inevitably some sackings. Although Gary at work, and Gerald an aeroplane enthusiast, both fancy Muriel, she is smitten by an unavailable pilot with a home in Lubeck, who flies to Birmingham irregularly. With his promotion and new job, his flight destinations change, taking him on short flights across Europe as well as long-haul flights to Japan. Nevertheless, it does bring the two together, when they decide to live in Brussels where Muriel works for the same airline as Franz writing for the in-flight magazine. Three years into the affair, Franz and Muriel marry in Brussels. The marriage is not known to Rebecca as she continues to maintain the home in Germany with Franz. Rebecca too gains a promotion, taking her closer to her dream – the secretive research of epimorphosis and epigenetics: cell regeneration, or more commonly, reversing the aging process.
Throughout her affair and marriage to Franz, Muriel receives messages of poetry and paintings from an anonymous stalker. Franz too begins to feel the stalker’s presence. Neither tells the other. Everyone has secrets. Franz has one too many. In 2015, twelve years after their marriage, secrets and the stalker are exposed. Muriel “was the dunce who took fifteen years to get the punchline” for, indeed, it is the story of a man who returns to his wife. Devastated, Muriel patiently plots her revenge. But who ultimately fulfills their dreams for love, health, wealth, and contentment?
Purnell delivers in-depth characters, comedy, suspense, and intrigue. Muriel, the mistress who becomes a wife, is revealed through first person narrative – her insecurities and emotions, and her desires for a married life. All other characters are uncovered through the third person. Rebecca, the wife’s character, is beautifully disclosed, much like peeling away the layers of an onion. So too is Franz’s life with Rebecca, whom he knew since primary school. The accumulation of information appears piece by piece until readers fully understand the “firm place” Rebecca has in Franz’s history and that leaving her would involve “unraveling an entire social fabric.” Although Muriel is not naïve, it is difficult to feel empathetic with her, but it is Franz that appears in the worst light.
Newspaper snippets, Muriel’s articles as a translator and writer, and Rebecca’s scrapbook pieces are inset into the novel, designed to provide additional insight but they are often distracting, especially when the text is cut mid-sentence or inappropriately. This is a problem of formatting which is also disconcerting throughout the entire novel. The changes between the first and third person narrative is confusing at times; so too is the dialogue, although in parts it is quite witty, and some sections on science and ageing appear irritating, as if written from lack of experience. Despite these challenges, the storyline gradually builds into a suspenseful page-turner.
The true strength of the novel is its narrative. The narrative is skillfully interspersed with linguistical insights into the world of translating: its pressures, its evolution from business to economy class travel to video-conferencing to translation machines to language software, and the frustrations of edits and corrections. Not only are foreign terms and language idiosyncrasies entwined into the story, so too are scientific theories, experiments, and breakthroughs, as well as the psychology and science of ageing. The Mistress is an ambitious first novel with enough to keep the reader entertained, resulting in, I suspect, strong positive and negative reactions to the characters: male and female, young and old, married and ‘wannabes’.
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