Taming the Beast, by Emily Maguire

Normally, I don’t do full-fledged book reviews on the blog–if I like a book, I mention it in passing or I give it a quasi-blurb as one of the right-hand “Picks of the Week.” But for unusual cases, I’ll make an exception, and this book is most certainly that. I can’t limit myself to a few words here and there, and it’s not available in the North America or the UK–only with a tiny publisher in Australia. Which is criminal. Which should be rectified as soon as is humanly possible.

I’ve mentioned Emily Maguire on the blog before, after her essay on being introverted impressed the hell out of me with its honesty and plain-spokenness about a subject that resonated all too well with me. After linking to that and a profile of her in the Sydney Morning Herald, I checked my email one day and got a very nice note from the author herself, wondering if I’d be interested in reading the book. I quickly answered yes, because I had an instinct I would like her fiction writing.

“Like” does not even encompass how I feel about TAMING THE BEAST. This is the kind of novel that seizes you from the first lines and forces you through the worst kind of agony and hell before spitting you out, completely gobsmacked, utterly spent, yet hopelessly addicted. To say I couldn’t put it down is an understatement. Throughout the novel’s 320-odd pages, my eyes seemed to widen as much as they possibly could, completely glued by the level of emotional disturbance portrayed in this book. Afterwards, I wanted to contract into myself, curl up into a fetal position and stare unfixedly at a wall–any wall.

Those first lines read as follows:

Sarah Clark felt like a freak for two and a half years. It started when she received a leather-bound copy of Othello for her twelfth birthday and ended when her English teacher showed her exactly what was meant by the beast with two backs.

But to call TAMING THE BEAST a simple tale of sexual abuse diminishes it tremendously. Yes, Sarah is a bookish, intelligent girl who is seduced by her teacher, Daniel Carr–but things are a great deal more complicated. She falls in love, and he with her–or is that really the case? He abruptly vanishes from her life a few months later, and she propels herself into the kind of self-destruction that is so tragic as to be almost a parody. Except that it isn’t, because at the heart of Sarah’s behavior is a profound sense of damage.

An example is when she’s at the bar one night with her friends, and after spying a random middle-aged man across the bar, brazenly announces she’s going to take him home that night, and even though she doesn’t much want to, she realizes she has to follow through with it:

…Sarah had no choice, because the man was ugly and the world being what it was, he probably never had women wanting to sleep with him. Sarah knew she was pretty, and that she knew she hadn’t done any more to deserve her beauty than the man had to deserve his ugliness. It wasn’t fair that he had to go through life being unwanted and untouched when Sarah had all the wanting and touching she could handle. And besides, Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. This man had as much chance as any other of being the man who would split her soul wide open.

And then Daniel re-enters her life. And things go beyond mere hell.

Emily Maguire asks some incredibly disquieting questions: what is love, and how can something that’s supposed to make a person better than themselves actually reduce her to an empty, spent shell? What is the nature of sex, and how does it have the power to hurt, to heal, to damage, to destroy, and to uplift?

TAMING THE BEAST is disturbing because it doesn’t take the easy way out–ever. Even as Sarah and Daniel engage each other in ways that seem unthinkable to most human beings, their actions are completely believable because they are based on their earlier history and their complementary states of damage. Abuser and abused, master and slave, companions and lovers–the boundaries constantly shift, the power balance changes from one to another and back again.

I stormed through this book in a matter of hours and was utterly spent. Yet Maguire had to live with this novel for years, write and rewrite and throw out and edit this book day after day until it was done. I cannot even imagine how she could do this, where in her mind and soul she pulled this book from. I can only stand back and admire the fact that she did.

The last time I had a reaction to a book like this was perhaps five years ago, after reading Dennis Lehane’s DARKNESS, TAKE MY HAND. It was such a visceral, disturbing response that even though I loved the book, I can’t reread it, and wouldn’t dare to. Same goes for TAMING THE BEAST. And to think, this is Maguire’s first novel, at the age of 27. I’d say that I can’t wait to see what she comes with next, but truthfully, I’m rather frightened. In the best possible way.