Culture

Author: Jill Marshall
Publisher: Penguin
( 4/5)

 
 
The blurb on the back of this book promised me a “pole dancer from Taranaki,” a beautiful man to be found “floating face-down in [a] Hollywood pool,” and “a tangled web of lies, sex and relationships that [would] keep [me] guessing until the last page.” Indeed, I was rewarded with all of these things.
The Most Beautiful Man in the World is a tangled mesh of personalities and personality disorders. Dr. David “Satan Himself” Osgood, for example, forces women into marriage to salvage his career, orders mistresses to have abortions, and “accidentally” kills a couple of people. That just sounds like simplistic character invention, but the novel is actually full of surprises. An apparent dimwit ends up as a bright postgraduate student, for example, and I was fooled into sharing beliefs with a character, only to find that the wool was being pulled over both our eyes.
I found this novel surprisingly good, but even the most masterful literary gastronomy cannot disguise the trashy ingredients therein. Engaging characters offer some form of saving grace, but one tires of reading description after description of beauty. If one woman had fantastic abdominal muscles (originally named “Abby”), another had waist-long Ophelia-esque hair. In, I suppose, some attempt to empower women, Jill Marshall makes all her female protagonists sexually aggressive women (SAWs). However, I’m not convinced that female readers will empathise with Marshall’s SAWS; I was left wondering why the hell someone would jump her tutor just because he got an erection over her work. Bewildering.
So, The Most Beautiful Man in the World is zany and compelling and should come with a warning label: exposure may cause procrastination. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this novel to men because they’ll end up with unrealistic expectations of what turns women on, but then again, the porn industry’s done that for us anyway. Anyway, give it a go because honestly, it’s got to be better than Twilight.