A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor

 

Summary (from the publisher): Harriet and Vesey meet when they are teenagers, and their love is as intense and instantaneous as it is innocent. But they are young. All life still lies ahead. Vesey heads off hopefully to pursue a career as an actor. Harriet marries and has a child, becoming a settled member of suburban society. And then Vesey returns, the worse for wear, and with him the love whose memory they have both sentimentally cherished, and even after so much has happened it cannot be denied. But things are not at all as they used to be. Love, it seems, is hardly designed to survive life.

One of the finest twentieth-century English novelists, Elizabeth Taylor, like her contemporaries Graham Greene, Richard Yates, and Michelangelo Antonioni, was a connoisseur of the modern world’s forsaken zones. Her characters are real, people caught out by their own desires and decisions, and they demand our attention. The be-stilled suburban backwaters she sets out to explore shimmer in her books with the punishing clarity of a desert mirage.

Review: In this novel, a teenage attraction is revisited years later, but it is perhaps too late. As teenagers, Harriet is shy and a disappointment to her proud suffragette mother. Vesey is unreliable and an inspiring actor. They are drawn to each other one summer, but the attraction remains largely unsaid and unexplored. Years later, Harriet has married a much older man and is the mother of a teenage girl. Vesey is a second-rate actor, and still as elusive and unreliable as other. Yet he represents things missing from Harriet's life: passion and excitement that is missing from her mundane existence.

At heart, this novel examines the pull of the characters' desires even when it's not in their best interest. It also explores the idea of missed chances and if there is the possibility to revisit those chances. At one moment in time, Harriet and Vesey were poised on the edge of a great love affair. It is a memory they have sentimentally valued for years afterward. When they meet again as adults, it seems like a chance to finally seize their chance. But time has altered them both and, in many ways, their connection is unsatisfying to them both. In short, you can't go back in time. 

Taylor does a good job at presenting morally ambiguous characters and letting her readers come to their own conclusions. Neither Harriet or Vesey were particularly likeable characters to me and I struggled to feel connected to their story or care about them. Well written and subtle storytelling but not a particularly enjoyable read for me. 

Stars: 3.5