Journalist/author Ellie Levenson’s first novel has a plot that could have gone in an action-thriller, even somehow Die Hard-esque way, and yet this is actually a story of choices, of chance, of the decisions we make that push us along, and the love that should save us, if we’re lucky.
Kate is a married mother of two not-quite-teen kids living in London with her husband of 16 years, the very-nearly-too-good-to-be-true Vic. However, she’s long had an arrangement with the also-married James where they meet in hotel rooms, always a different one, and a few times a year, for an afternoon of supposedly no-frills sex.
When she hooks up with James for their standard get-together, their post-coital peace, and awkwardness, is disrupted when they realise that the huge mass of police gathering outside the hotel are responding to a terrorist organisation that has taken over the building. Unable to leave the room, and unsure what’s going on downstairs, Kate doesn’t react by trying anything foolishly heroic but, instead, ponders at length about how exactly she got to be there on this terrible day.
This allows Levenson to ambitiously intersperse a series of complex flashbacks to key periods in Kate’s life: how she met Vic all those years ago in a cinema in Rome, and the happy series of events that led to them marrying and having a family; how she met James eight years previously through work, and was consumed by their attraction; and how everything seemed to be pointing Kate to this very moment. And, in the here and now, we explore how much she naturally wants the sweet chaos and exhaustion of her home life, rather than the uncertainty and doom that surely faces her.
Thankfully not really about terrorism, the group and their deeper intentions are wisely left vague, this is, of course, all about Kate, and how she grapples with her own mind as the sense of dread grows. And she, and we, are left waiting.
And waiting.
Rating: four stars
Room 706
Ellie Levenson
Hachette Australia: Headline
Paperback $34.99 | Hardback $49.99 | eBook $16.99 | Audiobook $44.99
