The Seduction by Joanna Briscoe review – therapist v family

Joanna Briscoe’s fifth novel opens with Beth spending a restless night on her therapist’s couch. She has abandoned her husband and child, seduced by the “promise of life as life was meant to be led, at its rawest and most frightening and most beautiful”. The novel takes us backwards, revealing the peculiar, dreamlike sequence of events that got her to this point, and forwards, showing her frantically restaking her claims on her own life.

This is familiar territory for Briscoe. In her work, successful upper middle-class London lives are interrupted by sudden rushes of transgressive desire. Seducers tap into hidden vulnerabilities, exposing and manipulating ever-increasing levels of need. Sleep With Me followed a love triangle created when a young French woman invades the marriage of a literary editor and academic living in Bloomsbury. Now she portrays another happy, creative marriage (Beth is a well-known artist, Sol a photographer) threatened by an interloper: Beth’s boundary-transgressing therapist, Tamara Bywater.

Beth initially goes to see Tamara because she’s finding herself overprotective of her 13-year-old daughter, Fern, fearful at this moment in her daughter’s life because when Beth was 13 she was abandoned by her own mother. The damage caused by Beth’s mother becomes a driving force in the novel, opening Beth up to Tamara’s exploitation.

In Briscoe’s novels, the narrative tends to build into an emotional explosion that’s offset by the calm tone of sociological inquiry. It’s this elision between modes that allows her to create nuanced works of literary fiction out of sensationalist material. Here, Beth lives in Camden, and we see her awaiting the money that is making its way north from King’s Cross, “regenerating the masonry, ousting the hippies”. There is a satirical portrait of the art world and its privilege.

The therapeutic relationship at the heart of The Seduction is balanced between these modes. There is a realist infrastructure. We learn that Dr Bywater is a consultant chartered clinical psychologist and see the turreted brick hospital where she works. Yet this setting is from the start partly a fantasy realm – “a deranged Victorian castle of a hospital” – and Beth’s sessions with Tamara are experienced largely as a dream. Tamara herself is a ghoulish shape-changer, transforming herself from a dowdy clinician to a vampish femme fatale.

Almost immediately, Beth begins to imagine that her therapist is present wherever she looks, and it’s often unclear whether the looks and touches they exchange in the consulting room and outside it are real or imagined. At first she tells herself that the intensity she experiences in her sessions is just the result of what she learns is called transference (for someone from her milieu she seems curiously ignorant about psychotherapy). But then Tamara tells her that she feels this unique connection, too, and quickly they abandon the therapeutic relationship to meet as friends.

Sometimes the juxtaposition of realism and dreamscape makes for a troubling reading experience. Hardly any of these chatty, overrunning therapy sessions rang true to me, given the level of training and supervision we have to believe Tamara has received. The speed with which we find Tamara saying things like “we had this soulmate thing going on” and “transference schmanference” seems too much to risk for someone who has survived years in a prestigious clinical setting, and is likely to cause more alarm bells in someone as drily intelligent as Beth.

Yet the point may be that Tamara isn’t meant to be a realistic portrait of an employed psychotherapist. She’s a gothic villain, in a tale of the psyche that increasingly feels as though it might be about to turn into a thriller. Or perhaps Briscoe is using Tamara’s unconvincingness to show that Beth is so much more vulnerable than she seems in daily life, that she’s pathologically incapable of identifying danger. Certainly it’s suggested that Tamara’s narcissistic personality disorder mirrors that of Beth’s mother, and that it’s this that makes Beth so susceptible to Tamara, allowing her to live out her own fantasy of tearing her world apart once again.

Either way, once we look beyond the relationship with the therapist, Beth’s relationships with her mother and especially her daughter are portrayed with a specificity and tenderness that make these scenes fully convincing. We can sense the weight of Fern’s body when Beth takes her in her arms, the stiffness of rejection when Fern refuses to let her mother touch her. If therapy feels so much flimsier than family life then perhaps this is the book’s underlying message: that care comes through instinct rather than training, that trust takes years to build, that talking can be as destructive as curative. Certainly, through this addictive, macabre fairground ride of a novel, Briscoe reminds us to value the quieter forms of love.

• Lara Feigel’s The Group is published by John Murray in July. The Seduction by Joanna Briscoe is published by Bloomsbury (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.