Book review : Never Tell - Claire Seeber

Never Tell is a novel told in two different time periods about twenty years apart, relating the past and present of a seemingly ordinary couple, Rose and James. Rose used to be a journalist - a fairly highly powered one, it would appear - but these days, since having kids, she's pretty much stopped working, just writing the odd article for the local paper while bringing up her children. Her husband  James is a successful businessman, but a less successful husband. He has little time for Rose, shuts her out of his "business meetings" with his friend and basically seems to want to spend as little time with his wife and kids as possible.

Going back in time twenty years, we see the young Rose and James in their student years at Oxford. Rose seems quite naive and unprepared as she heads off to university and, as her path soon crosses that of the debonair Dalziel, my motherly feelings made me want to reach out and protect her. As an eighteen-year-old, she's just interested in getting drunk, having fun and making new friends though. She soon ends up as a new guest of the Society X, which very much reminds me of the sordid American college fraternities often presented in teen films.

Dalziel is a complex character and his presentation isn't really sufficiently detailed to explain his multi-sided personality. He is rich, throwing money around like water, and he seems to have inherited the power of his family name. (Twenty years later, his father is pretty much in the running to become the next prime minister.) But he also seems to act like a little boy lost, unaware of what to do with all the new choices that he has at his disposal. His Society X parties, where he showers his followers with lavish surroundings, copious drugs and shocking sexual acts, all appear to me to be a big sign screaming "look at me and see how important I am". Unsurprisingly, he goes completely off the rails and pretty much self-destructs.

Rose and James were both caught up in the aftershock and, after a chance meeting a few years later, they got together as a pair of survivors. Then things start to get complicated. At a similarly lavish but slightly more grown-up party at their home, a trapeze artist is killed, then, as if things couldn't get any worse, James is arrested. Stunned, Rose starts to investigate her life, trying to work out if she really knows her husband at all or whether her life was all based on flimsy unrealities.

The book is quite slow to get into and there are numerous characters who vaguely fit into the storyline, while seeming to lurk in the half-shadows of the sidelines. I frequently had to stop and flick back to an earlier chapter to double-check how people and events fitted together. I unfortunately didn't really like any of the characters - while Rose seemed to be one of life's "takers", just dealing with whatever life throws at her without doing anything to make it better, pretty much all of the male characters completely annoyed me for being self-important, arrogant and misogynistic.

It took me a while to get into the book, maybe because I often read in bed at the end of the day and the tiny print in this version of the book soon gave me a headache. (I picked up a version that was given away for free with a newspaper in a charity shop.) Maybe, the fact that I disliked all of the characters means that I didn't really care what happened to any of them. I don't really know, but something about it made me less receptive to the story.

star rating : 3.5/5

RRP : £6.99

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Avon (15 April 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007334672
• ISBN-13: 978-0007334674
• Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 2.4 x 19.8 cm