Review: After the Fall

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Kylie Ladd's previous books are Naked: Confessions of Adultery and Infidelity (2008) and Living with Alzheimer's and Other Dementias (2006). She holds a PhD in neuropsychology and lives in Melbourne with her husband and two children. After The Fall is her first novel.

POSTED: 08 MARCH 2009

Kylie Ladd, After the Fall

(Allen & Unwin; 360pp paperback; $32.95)

WHAT appears at first a simple story of an extra-marital love affair and its effect on two marriages develops into a more interesting insight into the impenetrable nature of the human mind and how little we might really know about our nearest and dearest.

Kylie Ladd’s After the Fall is written in the first persons (yes, the plural is intentional). The story is disclosed through the eyes of each of the main characters — Kate, Cary, Luke and Cressida — and by friends Tim and Sara in random turn. Each narrates their thoughts, their version of events and experiences, and interprets the words and behaviour of the others in alternating short chapters.

Kate is a vivacious if somewhat self-centred woman. She lives in the moment, careless about consequences. On the rebound from a tumultuous university romance, she marries Cary — a calm, relaxed and comfortable man. Cary is devoted and awed by Kate's personality and counts himself lucky to have attracted a woman like her.

Luke is a charismatic and fully self-centred man who marries Cressida, a woman in the classical goddess-style who is also a dedicated paediatrician. Cress is loyal, demure, and self-effacing. She is willing to indulge Luke's continual flirting and sexual teasing with other women because she adores him and trusts in their vows of fidelity. She counts herself lucky to have attracted a man like him.

The story opens at the point when the affair has been discovered, and goes back in time to describe the friendship which began when both couples were already married. It dissects with anatomical precision the progress of the affair. While it is not a moralistic tale, the story reflects on different values of matrimony and its vows.

For example Cary and Cressida knew each other professionally when single, and we learn that Cary's first silent romantic interest was in Cressida. Once married, however his former attraction is relegated to some other sphere. He is in love with his wife and fidelity is part of his fulfillment. He imagines nothing else, and Cressida is much the same with Luke.

Kate and Luke however can imagine something else, and are willing to deceive and lie to participate in it. Their reason is that they are in love, a passion they cannot deny or refuse to enjoy. They are not heartless or evil, they just expect that they can indulge their senses secretly without causing harm to their spouses. As in real life, where this is rarely the case, it is not here either.

The affair changes all their lives and rearranges their personal relationships.

The style is interesting because the reader gains a special insight that each individual character alone does not have. We know what each character is really thinking, and we discover how other characters have received, or perceived their actions and words — often in entirely different ways from how they were intended. We see how differently individuals can interpret what they see and hear, always in the light of their own headspace, and how that impacts on the eventual outcome.

Ladd illustrates just what makes human interactions so difficult, and why mistake-free communication is so hard to achieve.

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