"She also cites Donna Tartt's The Secret History as an influence, which gives some clue to the setup that greets the reader in The Decadence. Namely, privileged university friends retreat to a haunted country house inherited, naturally, by one of the group to indulge in an array of illegal substances and sexual configurations. Bring it on, I thought. But though I tried very much to care about them, the twists and turns in the characters' relationships did not make much of an impression."
"The Decadence is written in a close third person that means we spend the story with Jan, a brittle, self-loathing PhD student whose dissatisfaction with the two female friends she's been sleeping with preoccupies her to a tedious degree. As for the others, the characterisation is shallow. None of the dialogue feels authentic (Ursie, you brought the Pimm's, right?), there is too much exposition, and the political arguments that the friends keep having feel shoehorned in."
"On a sentence level, the book is overwritten, a veritable festival of adverbs and adjectives that left me feeling almost queasy decadence indeed. The faint mothball smell that emanated from the light-raked silk curtains cast her back into the realm of memory. To love her now felt not unlike being the last adherent of a secret religion, tending to a dwindling sacred flame in hope of the return of a ravenous and uncaring god."
A queer haunted-house story follows privileged university friends who retreat to an inherited country house to take illegal substances and experiment sexually. The narrative centers on Jan, a brittle, self-loathing PhD student, narrated in close third person, who becomes obsessively dissatisfied with two female lovers. Characterization beyond Jan remains shallow, dialogue often feels inauthentic, exposition is heavy, and political debates among the friends feel tacked on. The prose is overwritten with excessive adverbs and adjectives, producing vivid yet queasy imagery. Supernatural elements include an antisemitic ghost; drug portrayals fail to capture the experience compellingly.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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