Title: True Romance
Author/Artist: Helen Zahavi
Publisher: Minerva
Media: Book
Reviewer: Pan
Dirty Weekend, the debut novel from Helen Zahavi, was one of those books that just grabbed the headlines when it came out. The story of shy retiring Bella, it detailed how she went from victim to executioner, doing a female Charles Bronson and wiping out various male creeps who never knew what hit them. When Michael Winner turned the book into a film it all made perfect sense, here at last was the female version of Death Wish. Her latest book, which promises to be 'the most politically incorrect book of the year', was eagerly looked forward to by yours truly. The result though is not only disappointing it's one of the few books I've read that bored me to tears whilst pissing me off substantially.
True Romance starts with a lurid pink cover and a cartoon character SM female, which is the best thing about the book. The story is of a nameless female refugee, who is taken in by an older man. She submits to him of course, getting involved in an SM relationship, which soon involves a second man to whom she also submits. The book is a total failure, it tells us nothing about the position of women in general, nothing about SM, nothing about domination and submission, nothing worth knowing. It doesn't even have an interesting story...This can only be the most politically incorrect book of the year if your reading extends no further than Mills and Boon (sorry, that might be unfair to Mills and Boon).
What pisses me off most of all is that this is the book that'll be taken seriously by critics, who'll see this as the book of SM. With all the reviews in the quality papers and all the hype surrounding it, this is also the book that people will read if they want to gain insight into what SM is all about. All that Helen Zahavi's done is to rip off some SM imagery and then write a boring little story full of trite word-play and the kind of verbal tricks most sixth formers would be embarrassed by. Some pervy book companies have already included this in their catalogues, which is a shame. Don't buy it, spend your money on something better.