The plot itself is rather clichéd, although attacked by the writer in a feisty and direct manner. Sarah Clark, a prodigy and a nerd, experiences sexual awakening in a high school English class in suburban Sydney, where Shakespeare and Donne lead her directly into the arms of her teacher, Daniel Carr. The prodigy takes to sexual studies the same way she took to academic studies, and soon enough their affair is all consuming and dangerously violent. Carr flees to Brisbane with his family, leaving Sarah only memories. This part of the novel is uncomfortable to read, but mostly well written, with the exception of the shoehorned quotations by prominent writers that make their way into the dialogue and narrative. Sarah is clear about the choice she is making, and her strength and conviction go a long way to making this a believable love story.
It is in part two that Maguire goes wrong, on reflection. The story picks up some years later, with Sarah now a twenty-one-year-old honours student at university with a reputation for sleeping around. Her affair as an adolescent has turned her into a rampant nymphomaniac who has no interest in tenderness or affection. She studies hard, screws hard and lives in a spartan flat filled with beer cans. Her life is balanced somewhat by her childhood friend Jamie, who has her best interests at heart, but his own girlfriend's pregnancy and his own feelings for Sarah lead to complications, even before the inevitable re-appearance of Daniel Carr...
The concept behind 'Taming The Beast' is promising, and part one gives the impression that Maguire has really thought about the controversial subject she is examining, but sadly this good work goes by the wayside as cliché after cliché is relentlessly rolled out, from the way that young men like Jamie get trapped into fatherhood at too young an age to the negative way that all of Sarah's friends view her carnality. The sex scenes occur with such regularity and with such depressing amounts of detail that they soon lose all power. You are literally anaesthetised to them after thirty pages, and yet Maguire never lets up- most of the book seems to be laboured descriptions of vaguely edgy sex. The dialogue and interior monologues of Jamie and Sarah are particularly excruciating, and upon his reappearance, Daniel becomes a pantomime villain rather than a genuinely complicated and ambivalent figure.
My guess is that Maguire wanted to tell us that true love is neither pleasant nor polite, that it is a raging, inescapable conflagration that destroys all in its path. Her implication seems to be that Shakespeare and his cohorts thought this too, and she rolls out a whole laundry load of quotations from the Sonnets and 'Othello' to prove her point. I hate it when writers try to prove their erudition by telling the reader what they've read. It hardly ever comes across well. The third person narrative is unbelievably embarrassing at times, with the filtering through the primary characters usually hitting the level of a mid-1980s problem page letter to Just 17. The prose style picks up again in the last few pages, but by then, it's too late.
I really wish I hadn't re-read this book. Although it was a nice easy read to get my eye in for a long six weeks of work free reading, going back to it spoiled the positive memory I had of it. I suppose that one's perception of a book is sharply bound up in the memories of the time it was read in, and four years is most certainly enough time for the rose tinted spectacles to be removed. So I can definitely tell my twenty-seven-year-old self that he was wrong for enjoying this book first time round. It starts promisingly and ends powerfully, but the long middle section is just embarrassing really. If you want to see this kind of storyline done well, try Zoe Heller's 'Notes On A Scandal', which I feel like re-reading to take the bad taste of this out of my mouth.
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