Compulsion (Kate Scott, Hamish Hamilton)

Lucy is a music journalist with a penchant for 80s party dresses, long, languorous walks, and throwing decadent dinner parties for her friends. Robin is the dark-eyed, softly spoken man she meets by a bridge in the small seaside town of Abergele. Lucy has run there to escape the trailing fingers of disintegrating, damaging relationships and ‘take the cure’; Robin is there to care for his dying grandmother. They are two lonely, exiled souls falling into step, trying to extricate themselves from the entangled web of lives and relationships in which they find each other. Compulsion’s strengths as a novel lie in its languid prose, a richness of writing that paints an evocative picture of almost Romantic-style dreamers and poets whiling away their evenings in a haze of cigarette smoke, sparkling wine and a veritable pharmacy of illicit drugs. Author Kate Scott has drawn from her own experiences as a music journalist, and the insights into the at-times chaotic music industry of the early noughties that Compulsion explores are as fascinating as the industry can be destructive. While the pace and plotting of this novel can run a little slow, the trade-off is the delicious and cathartic coming-together of Robin and Lucy, two kindred spirits finding an oasis in each other amid spilt drinks, sparkly party dresses and kicked-off platform boots.

Georgia Brough is a teacher, reviewer and writer based in Hobart. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews