Greater Love
by Lucy Wadham
Faber & Faber, HK$214
Greater Love feels wrong, but reads right. That's probably because the reader is lulled into thinking that the story is set decades ago, until the World Trade Centre terrorist attack of 2001 suddenly hurtles them into the present. Never mind that Lucy Wadham details early in the novel that her protagonist Aisha and twin Jose were conceived in 1980, when their mother was raped. Somehow the author colours her writing with a wash of sepia that stubbornly remains, despite the odd contemporary reference (to Ikea, for example). Having endured 20 years of coldness from her mother, whose antipathy towards her brother is even more pronounced, Aisha moves from bucolic Portugal to Paris, where she works as a nanny, studies at the Sorbonne and discovers sex: she begins an affair with her employer. Guilty about having abandoned her brother, Aisha eventually invites him to visit her, but it's in Paris that their estrangement becomes undeniable, leading him to seek solace in Islam with a Muslim cleric his sister distrusts. However, as she soon realises,
her suspicions are misplaced. A linear work that explores various forms of love and loyalty, Wadham's debut novel is enjoyable if at times fanciful and a tad drawn out.
