Customer Reviews

Exposure

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3 star:		(1)
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When Alistair Langford, a respected London barrister, is kneecapped one night after a dinner with friends, the perpetrators are quickly arrested. Questioned by the authorities, the they reveal a sordid dalliance, rending the careful fabric of Alistair's life, his blameless wife and family the beneficiaries of this shameful event. Soon after, Alistair's wife, Rosalind, receives a call that that her husband's mother has died. This call is yet another shock to Rosalind, who was told that Alistair's parents died when he was young. Suddenly, the carefully woven past Langford has assembled falls away and he is forced to account for a history of deception, all in service of hiding a past defined by poverty and a mother's questionable lifestyle. Deeply embarrassed and ashamed, Alistair has come to the moment of truth; whether he can accept his own history and make amends to his wronged wife is another matter, as Langford is a proud and cautious man.

Alistair requests the help of his popular and successful son, Luke, unable to drive himself to Dover to make arrangements for his mother's effects. For his part, Luke, a self-styled clubber, partier and bon vivant, is floundering, recently released from an amorous relationship with a narcissistic actress, Arianne. Luke cannot break free of his obsession with Arianne, positive she will realize her mistake and return to him. Under her spell, Luke's vulnerability is painful to observe; he remains oblivious to Arianne's manipulations, a shadow of the man his friends know. While in Dover with his father, Luke befriends two refugees from Kosovo, Mila and Goran and it is through these characters that Stevenson artfully skewers the pretensions of the middle class, the "egocentric complacency Western money can buy". Goran eventually learns to detest Luke's simplistic self-indulgence, "he hated Luke for his pointless angst, which was the agony of privileged people".

Stevenson has a firm grasp of her characters, their flaws, fears and inability to ask for support from one another. In this acute novel, all are forced to confront their pretensions, insecurities and motivations, their perfectly orchestrated public facades. Alistair's existence is defined by lies, infidelity and denial, his family passively absorbing the price of their position, a profoundly casual acceptance of middle class values and aspirations, assuming they are superior, untouchable, until the collapse of their false security. Peeling away the distractions that shield each character, the author exposes the minutiae that fill every waking moment of the Langford`s. In the end, everyone is vulnerable to fate's intervention, distractions crumbling before fear and self-doubt, the lesson unmistakable, a class-conscious society unmasked. While it may be premature to credit Stevenson with the attributes of a Henry James, to her credit, this author can wield a scalpel, making precise incisions into English sensibilities. Luan Gaines/2005.

Just finished this book. Wow! I need to take a breath. As cliche as it all sounds, a tour de force truly. A keen breath-taking observation of human frailty and strength, of the human condition in all. Screaming with emotion, these characters come ALIVE. Alistair, Rosalind, and Luke... Stevenson captures it beautifully--the beautiful and scary isolation of being a human being in this world, and those ties that bind these solitary entities to the family, that thing that is both their downfall and their salvation. Inherently an optimistic book, the plot centers around the emotional lives of these characters in a way that makes you feel as if you're watching a densely plotted movie even though all that's going on is a severe and gut wrenching process of human awakening. That rare gem of a book... Read it now! Your life will be the better for it.

The plot line of Exposure is aptly summarized elsewhere, so I will not re-summarize it here. Rather I will address some of its strengths and weaknesses, as I see them.
I was thoroughly engrossed by this book. The author involves you in each of the main characters - Alistair, Luke and Rosalind especially - and some of the lesser ones - Goran and Mila - by switching the (often stream-of-consciousness) narrative from one character to another (and back again) as the story progresses. The plot has enough major events to hold most readers' interest. The author engages the reader early on by alluding to the major tragic events in Alistair's and Luke's lives but withholding the details, as well as the underlying reasons for and causes of, these events until midway through the story. She devotes the rest of the book to the events' resolution (or not). It is noteworthy that this 28 year old female writer most successfully inhabits the psyches of two men - one her age and the old enough to be, ....her father - who carry the story line from beginning to end.
Ultimately this book is less about class differences than about the nature of love in all its manifestations - sexual, spousal, maternal, paternal, et. al. The author plays with this subject over and over again throughout the book and succeeds in making the reader care about her characters. Anyone who has lived through the break-up of a passionate liaison will identify with Luke's emotional highs and lows. Alistair provides a much more complex set of emotions that may be harder to grasp, but nonetheless are elaborately realized in this book. Late in the book there is a moment of emotional exposure and communication between father and son (Alistair and Luke) that, while emotionally restrained in the British manner, was deeply moving.
With apologies to the author, I found some of her meditations on the many facets of love a bit longish and sometimes a bit unconvincing or inconclusive. At times, I found myself skipping over some of the longer and more meandering dialogues. Perhaps this due in part to the youthfulness of the author, who cannot fully capture the perspective of a 63 year old lawyer, husband and father. Nonetheless, I recommend this book.

Exposing the hypocrisy and duplicity of British upper middle-class society, author Talitha Stevenson's exquisitely written novel, Exposure recounts what happens when sexual obsession threatens to break down the carefully drawn façade, the finely drawn pretense of a London well do to family. Caught up in a web of lies, the Langford family is rocked by scandal and heartbreak, their carefully planned and well-ordered world gradually collapsing around them.

Alistair Langford has a successful is a career as a prosecution barrister at London's Old Bailey. Married to the elegant and loyal Rosalind, Alistair has everything he could possibility wish for - a lovely house in Holland Park, two healthy children, Luke and Sophie, and a beautiful wife, but Alistair has spent his whole life seeking to escape from his working class past; his bourgeois existence built on lies and deception.

Resenting his uneducated single mother, who entertaining numerous single men and wasted her life running a boarding house in Dover, Alistair yearned to escape, managing to obtain a scholarship to Oxford. Finally able to associate with the educated upper classes, "he had chosen a clean ordered world with no smell of fried breakfasts or of large unknown men," Alistair has learnt to take nothing for granted, he's proud of his accomplishments, thankful that his past has been forever buried.

But one night, while leaving a dinner party, Alistair is brutally attacked by two unknown assailants. With his kneecap shattered, his pride and sense of self worth devastated, Alistair is forced to confront his terrible mistake, his squalid dalliance in a hotel room with a young girl, a witness for the defense in a case that he was currently trying. Shamed by the public, his family outraged at his infidelity, the aging barrister must, after years of marriage, account for all his years of deception.

Previously, Alistair had exercised a life of such intense self-control, relishing his imprisonment in his own ambitions, ritualizing it like an act of obedient prayer. But now his past rockets back into his life, his memories of his mother coming back to him intact "with her curlers, and her fears." He had wanted to forget where he grew up and lose himself in another world, but now he's in a state of perpetual war with himself, appearing constantly in a state of dualistic adoration and loathing of his own wealth.

With his mother now dead, Alistair entrusts the help of his son to drive him to Dover to tie up the lose ends of his mother's estate; it is here that he is forced to confront his life of secrets, betrayals, and longings; his grief, pride, and heartbreak, and the duplicitous of his ambition. Meanwhile, the spoilt and facile Luke has his own demons to contend with. He's become dangerously obsessed with Adrienne a gorgeous and selfish ex-girlfriend, who moved in to his Notting Hill apartment and than promptly dumped him for another man.

Sexually obsessed and wracked with grief, all Luke wants to do is to get closer - always closer to Arianne, "he could not bear to lose her for even a second to her modes of escape. Arianne had a sense of fate; it heaved outsiders into mystified passivity." To Luke, this passivity was just one more mode of sensual abandonment; she transfigures the guilt about life that Luke feels, "drawing the waste the hours spent in bed ignoring his work ethic, into the realm of self expression." Only through giving shelter and food to Mila and Goran, two refugees from Kosovo, can Luke perhaps achieve any hope of redemption and fulfillment.

Stevenson skillfully explores the dark undercurrents of deception, sexual longing, and betrayal through her characters' distorted vision, the plot deftly heightening the main characters journey into moral ambiguity, exposing their deepest insecurities and fears. A dreaded feeling of inevitability steadily permeates the narrative, as Alistair desperate to save his marriage, must finally confront Rosalind, while Luke, high on drugs and alcohol, comes, once and for all, face to face with Arianne, his beautiful and destructive nemesis.

Stevenson writes with an astounding self-confidence, totally in tune to the all the restrained hypocrisies of the English middle classes. Alistair sees himself as a man of accomplishment whose only mistake after almost forty years of marriage is to seek the comforts of an extra-marital dalliance, while Luke is ultimately blinded by the enormity of his loss, deluded by the pain of unrequited love.

The characters in Exposure are vulnerable, exposed; haunted by the practice of deceit and the ineffable urge to tell the truth, to uncover a web of lies and falsehood that seems to be forever entwined. Mike Leonard November 05.

this was a very good, but not excellent, book. it fell short of excellent because i just couldn't love the characters. they were very well developed and they all became more "lovable" as the book went on, but i just never fell for them. and for me, at least one character that i love is necessary to love a book. however, having said that, i would still highly recommend this book as it is beautifully written and very engaging - i found it hard to put down. also, i found some if its central themes very appealing: love is forever; people can change; redemption is possible. i know these sound trite - but ms. stevenson handles them in unique and insightful ways. also, story itself, while not a reinvention of the wheel (many of the plot lines are familiar), is handled in a capable way.