FAITHLESS by Alice Neilson is a good novel for a particular literary genre and will find a following among women intrigued with romance. The story is entirely the main character Cressida’s 300-page missive she writes to her lover Max. She begins her manuscript a few days after Max dies. He will never read what she writes to him. Max was a famous writer. He was married with no intention of leaving his wife for Cressida. She accepts the life of the ‘other woman’ and is entirely devoted to him. Max and Cressida have a long relationship until she marries the stable, caring Leo. Leo and Max are opposite types of men; she still longs for Max.  

In Cressida’s long missive to Max, she pops in references to Proust, Kafka, Beckett, Francis Bacon and other writers. Max did the same. She recalls asking him where he felt most at home. His reply was a quote from Goethe, “Everywhere a stranger and everywhere at home”. It seems they lived their lives vicariously through the writers they read. This name-dropping casts Cressida and Max as living hollow lives. Cressida writes long descriptions of her time together with Max: remember when we were in Venice? In India? In London? In Cambridge? They only went to the best places. 

They are not likeable characters. Cressida was raised in India where her mother still runs a hotel. Cressida doesn’t help her mother or seem to care about her financial struggles. Max has an affair with Cressida’s best friend. Max must be quite a man to have kept a devoted wife and long-term lovers. Despite the novel being about these romances, there is no sex in it at all. Quite the opposite. The story is subdued – all genteel lunches and strolls through museums.

There is the saving grace in the novel. Cressida takes on the care of a foster child. It would be a spoiler to say how this occurred. She regards this act of generosity as a way of compensating for all the lies she has told and the misdeeds she has committed in her adult relationships.

Author Alice Neilson is an Australian currently living in France. Faithless is her third novel. Her first, The Last Sky, won the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelist Award. Her second, The Children’s House was published in Australia, France and Germany.

 

Vintage Books Australia, Released August 4, 2022

ISBN 978 014379 120 1

Paperback $26

Audio: $16

Review by Carol Dance