Books: the good, the bad and the patently ridiculous

Have you ever read a book that was so bad, you felt ashamed of yourself for finishing it?

All along, you knew that the book was dreadful; that the characters were poorly drawn and unbelievable, that the content had ‘nothing to say about my life’, and that the book had no moral centre, and yet you still kept reading it. Why??

I have just read such a book and now I feel grubby and ashamed.

Maestra - by L.S Hilton had been recommended to me, by someone who’s opinion I respect, as a well-written, more intellectual version of Fifty Shades of Grey. This person hasn’t actually read Maestra, just read about it, and the assumption seemed to be that just because L.S Hinton is an Oxford graduate, who usually writes historical books, that the book would be a masterpiece (with a load of sex thrown in).

This is not the case at all. The book reads like a terrible (but not a particularly entertaining) 1980/90s bonkbuster. Set in the art-world (with plenty of uninteresting detail of how things function in an auction house), the characters are brittle and one dimensional and there are loads of references to fashion labels. I suppose this is supposed to make it aspirational but I couldn’t give a flying f**k about designer brands and all mention of them becomes tedious very quickly. And the sex, the sex is dreadful, just so woeful. It is the most mechanical, joyless and unerotic sex, I’ve read. There is no way of writing this without sounding sexist so I’m just going to say it; the sex reads like it has been written by a man, or an adolescent boy, because there is so little ‘preamble’.

The characters in Maestra eat a lot of fish and figs before getting down to business (heavily unsubtle symbolism of food representing genitalia). There is a particularly revolting scene where a character retrieves a sea urchin for he and the main protagonist, Judith, to eat raw before following this appetising snack up with some deeply unsexy sex. They bark instructions at each other, like despotic P.E teachers, and really, they may as well have been playing rounders for all the interest it held.

There is a particularly gruesome murder, towards the end of the book, which features dismemberment, which is only slightly less unpalatable than the sex scenes.

The bright red cover features an illustration of a vertical tear - more clunkingly unsubtle symbolism, and a sticker warning of adult content. There is a picture of the author on the flyleaf and, guess what? She has long blonde hair and wears designer clothing, so she must be qualified to write erotic fiction. Far more so than old E.L James who, leather jacket notwithstanding, looks like she’d be perfectly at home behind the cake stall at a jumble sale. (I amused myself this morning by imagining what the 'E' in E. L. James stood for. The most likely candidate would be Elaine but I was trying to imagine the unsexiest moniker: Edith? Ethel? Edna?) How about L.S Hilton? Linda? Leeza?)

Anyway, Maestra is a cold, hard, brutal book and it reads like the person who has written it, hates humanity. People get murdered, but you don’t care, because everyone in it is horrible. The main character reeks revenge on her enemies but you are indifferent, because she is the most revolting one of the lot.