The Primrose

Rating:
Summary: Deeper than you think!
Review: THE PRIMROSE by Patience H. Jacoby explores the journeys into the inner selves of Tom and Theres, intercontinental Internet lovers who take their encounter to the next level and run away on the Orient Express from Britain to Istanbul. Its conclusion does not neatly resolve Tom's dilemma, his commitments to family versus his opportunity to begin a new life with the younger and vital Theres, and there is an ambiguity that allows the reader to impose his or her own interpretation on the denouement.

P. H. Jacoby developed the parallel themes of illicit love and the Orient Express journey as a dramatic way of finding out what may happen when two people pursue happiness in a romantic encounter.

Her sense of the erotic illuminates and colors the story, and challenges us to consider the possibilities of the erotic impulse for transforming and enhancing lives. THE PRIMROSE takes the romantic genre to another level of complexity. Tom pursues his amorous obsession with Theres in a series of advances and reversals that mirror the contradictions of his own heart and history. Each whistle stop on the journey to the East becomes a station of the heart, a discovery of intimacy, and a tour of Europe's cultures.

The ending suggests that Tom and Theres have not arrived at the end of their journeys, although there's ambivalence about whether those journeys will be continued alone or together. Are the stations of our lives more important than final destinations? Is it better to travel hopefully than to arrive? Is the present moment always to be grasped at even as it slips through our lives into the past? Only an ambitious novel could pose these eternal questions.

There is a fair amount of rather explicit intimacy in this book and thus it is not for those that object to this kind of stuff. Personally, I found it extremely good - it had to be there and I think it just shows that the two main characters not only fit together well on a personal-public level, but also behind closed doors.

I was impressed by the development of the characters, and the depth of the writer's apparent knowledge about what makes people 'tick' and what makes them suffer.