Sophie Mackintosh’s poignant novel follows Clara and Francis, who for months have been having an illicit affair, stealing hours in hotel rooms, the time slipping away from them. Until one morning they wake up side by side with no memory of how they got there, transported to a new world in which they are surrounded by other adulterous couples. While in this existence, they can spend all the time they want together, but with no known way to return to their true lives, how long can they really stand it?
It’s a concept that wouldn’t feel out of place in an episode of Black Mirror, yet Mackintosh is an unquestionably skilled writer. Her prose is lush, and the way she captures desire is dizzying in its sensuality. The alternate world she creates is seductive, filled with “fragrant tunnels of trailing wisteria”, and light “diced in buttery cubes on the floor”. We, as much as her characters, are entranced by this, both longing to stay while recognising an undercurrent of unease, fuelled by the universe’s ever-shifting balance between ecstasy and intoxication. In one scene, the characters are “submerged in bliss”; in the next, that same bliss becomes warped with excess, something that gives a frenetic feel to the writing and ensures we, like the lovers, know we cannot remain in the fantasy.
Throughout Permanence, narration alternates between characters, revealing the nature of their relationship and how each individual views it. Francis is married with a child, unlike Clara, who is younger and finds herself waiting for his call when they are in the real world. Because of this, there are obvious contrasts to how each views their new, unfamiliar life, and differences as well in how long they are prepared to remain. It is he who questions why the city has brought them there, while she begs it to let them stay, with the confession that he has “unpeeled the skin from her bones, left her tender and exposed to the world”.
Mackintosh’s latest is a unique, introspective book that interrogates how much we can truly sacrifice for love, and what paradise really means. At once quietly devastating and creepily unsettling, it’s her best work yet.
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Emily Goulding is a freelance reviewer based in London
