Review: Intensely written, beautifully crafted...ultimately believable. Sigh.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 29, 2012
Amy Lane (always a favorite) and Aleksandr Voinov have teamed up to write "Country Mouse," a novella set in modern-day London. It's sort of like the recent gay film "Weekend," and indeed is just that, the story of a random Friday night hookup gone terribly terribly...right.Yeah, I'm a sap and a sucker for such, but the writing in this is intense, and elegant. The happenstance that brings Owen and Malcolm together in a grungy bar in London is irrelevant; the entire focus of the story is on the unexpected chemistry, physical and emotional, that emerges between these two in the course of their two nights together.The untraveled American country boy and the repressed, driven City day-trader would seem to be doomed from the start; but the sorry unreels in a very different way. This is not the kind of plot that would be believable if not for the authors' very careful crafting of the narrative. We have to understand every little step of the process from the first meeting to the final embrace. And the authors do it, making a long story that could seem impossible or absurd into one that makes us feel the inevitability of its last page. Great writing in a small package.