Stelle Duffy: Parallel lies

Don't be fooled by the fuchsia cover — this isn't lighthearted, bubbly chick lit. It may have all the elements: Hollywood parties, secrets, film sets and cocaine sniffing, but jokes, details of splendour and a titillating sex scene are nowhere to be found. Parallel Lies is more romantic drama than romantic comedy.

The narrator, Penny, gives us a self-obsessed account of life as personal assistant to Yana Ivanova, a beautiful Russian model-turned-actress. Emphasis on personal: Penny and Yana are actually long-time lovers, but for the sake of her career, Yana hides their lesbianism by paying an actor, Jimmy, to play the part of her live-in boyfriend. Cue jealousy on Penny's part, boredom and game-playing on Jimmy's. Reveal Yana's ambition, power and paranoia, and you're in for what should be an interesting melodrama of cat and mouse, a modern-day version of Dangerous Liaisons among the film aristocracy. And when several knowing anonymous letters appear, the stage is set for a psycho-thriller from the pen of an author known for her murder mysteries.

But Penny's repetition slows down the narrative. We hear again and again how she loves Yana; how Yana loves her; how Yana's vulnerable; how Jimmy's a player but he's not all bad. "Jimmy had good plans," Penny tells us at one point, but we're not allowed to know those plans, so we can't make up our own minds about their worth. Some dialogue would be nice to back up Penny's version of events, but nobody else is allowed a word in edgeways. The servant invisible to the outside world is, for once, having her say; this is show-and-tell without the show.

Yet you keep turning the pages, to find out what will happen. You're rewarded by two twists: one happily surprising but superfluous to the action — no matter how hard Penny tries to tie it in with psychobabble — and the other more explanatory but hardly unexpected.

The prose is delivered in short, clipped sentences — stream-of-consciousness from a self-controlled and organised narrator. But it isn't always a good idea to steal limelight from the plot and give it to a self-consciously literary narrator.

As far as pink holiday novels go, there's trash and then there's good trash, and the best trash wears its white pants with a swagger. The set-up of Parallel Lies is intriguing enough and without Penny's attempts at meaningful observations, it would be an absorbing read.

* Janet McAllister is a canvas writer.
* Virago, $39.95