The Engagement by Chloe Hooper

The Daily Telegraph 8 March 2013

Liese Campbell, the narrator of Chloe Hooper’s third novel The Engagement, thinks like a computer: “If I dropped something on the ground I’d think, Control Z, the short cut for ‘undo’.” When the novel begins, the 35-year-old architect has fled her computerised life in London (and her debts) to work for her uncle’s real estate company in Australia. The rest of the action takes place almost entirely between her and one other character in empty properties. She describes what happens to her next as “Pygmalion done with offal”.

The Pygmalion Liese refers to is Alexander Colquhoun, a wealthy client of her uncle who becomes a client of hers after she shows him a series of luxury apartments. They begin a series of disturbing sexual encounters.

Hooper makes it seem entirely reasonable that while Alexander pays Liese for the sex they have, she does not think of herself as a prostitute. She enjoys the sex and likes the money. She does not seem quite in control of her own body: “I was more curvaceous than suited my personality.”

Her disassociation might be a necessary state for someone being paid for sex, but there is something thrillingly subversive about her detachment.

She indulges Alexander, fabricating stories about brothels she has worked in and other clients who will be kept waiting if they do not finish on time. She reassures herself that he knows they are “playing”, but the idea of her as a sex worker is worryingly seductive to both of them. As she says, “my fantasy – in a sense, the contents of my mind – had been made public”.

Hooper’s great skill is not to offer any shocking backstory which might explain why this middle-class woman in her mid-thirties might want to play-act being a prostitute. There is a moment of comedy when Alexander realises that Liese is not quite the misfit he imagined and that her parents are both alive and well and living in Norfolk – even contactable by phone, an idea which seems perverse to him.

The engagement of the title is partly the three days Liese agrees to spend with Alexander at his remote property in Warrowill. She convinces herself that this will be the last of her assignments before she leaves Australia.

Warrowill, however, is not easily escaped, and has something of Bluebeard’s castle about it. There is a butchered swan in the kitchen, poison pen letters in the study and wardrobes of an unknown woman’s clothes in the bedroom. The haunting strangeness of this section of the book is less ham-fisted than it sounds: Liese’s nightmare is menacingly credible.

Hooper’s previous book, The Tall Man, was a work of highly praised non-fiction about a true crime. It was described by Philip Roth as “A masterful moral thriller”. The same phrase could be used about The Engagement, but the novel has an affecting oddness all its own. Its exploration of submission has provoked comparisons with E L James, but Hooper has skewered the acquisitive yearnings of the Fifty Shades of Grey heroine: simply being desired enough to be paid for sex gives Liese “sudden power after years with none”.

I hope that some of E L James’s seemingly insatiable fans chance upon The Engagement and find there is more satisfaction in its pages than in Christian Grey’s whipping room.

This review originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph