![]() It was just a very good novel by a moderately successful television writer. It didn’t brutally kill off Liz Shaw, come out months late and by a different author, have Benny schtupping the Eighth Doctor, reveal the secret origins of the Doctor, or add to Kate Orman’s terrifying tally of books in a relatively short period of time. Upon release it was well-liked, but sandwiched in amongst the final year of New Adventures it was, if we’re being honest, forgettable. ![]() Like Human Nature, the perspective on Damaged Goods has shifted fundamentally since its release. And the Conservative government’s majority manages to fall to a single seat as Peter Thurnham defects to the Lib-Dems. And Laurent Kabilia makes significant progress towards his eventual takeover of what is still Zaire at the time. New Zealand agrees to pay $130 million in compensation for the 150-year-old treatment of the Maori population. ![]() The second OJ Simpson trial begins, because once just wasn’t enough. In news, the former prime minister of Bulgaria is assassinated. Which, of course, can’t possibly hold up to the Spice Girls’ second single “Say You’ll Be There.” Celine Dion, Donna Lewis, Blackstreet, the Manic Street Preachers, the Fugees, Phil Collins, and LL Cool J also chart, so it’s exactly as bad a month as you think it is. Deep Blue Something are being one hit wonders with “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” That unsurprisingly doesn’t list as the Chemical Brothers take over with “Setting Sun.” That also doesn’t last, with Boyzone’s “Words” going to number one. It’s no fun wondering if your husband’s love could be another act of kindness, whether there’s something about you he feels you need to be compensated for, as if you too qualify as his sort of damaged goods.It’s October of 1996. So endearing until you think of it turned your way. Point of view issues aside, the story contains a lovely moment of insight which goes to the question at the heart of the story (Who is damaged goods?) when the narrator muses: ‘And then I think of Strawberry Alison and his boyhood conviction that he alone understood her trouble, that only he saw the true face behind the mask. Nothing’s changed in that regard.’ If Vic isn’t the confiding sort how does the narrator know his story in such depth? Are we supposed to doubt the truth of her story? I’m not convinced. Later Winton writes, ‘As a boy Vic was not the confiding sort. But at night he got himself into far simpler turmoil thinking of her long legs around him and her breasts in his hands.’ It’s a strange mingling of first and second person points of view that stretches plausibility: How much of Vic’s story – which happened long before they met – can the narrator know? He worked himself up into a romantic fantasy. Winton sets it up the rules in the opening paragraph: ‘He told the story so many times that I feel like I was there, that I lived it with him.’ This allows the narrator to tell her husband’s story as if it were happening to her, for example: ‘During the day he dreamt of piling her into a car and tearing out of town. ![]() The nameless female narrator tells the story of her husband Vic’s teenage obsession with Strawberry Alison, a girl with a lurid crimson birthmark which ‘covered half her face and neck, like a mask incompletely removed.’ He didn’t just rattle these memories off – he’s never been that kind of bore – I had to wheedle them out of him. He told the story so many times that I feel like I was there, that I lived it with him. It’s a story he used to tell against himself in a kind of wistful tone, and to be honest it was one of the things about his that charmed me, that and his earnest demeanour. It began when he was almost fourteen and went on all through high school like a fever that wouldn’t break. My husband had this thing about a girl with a birthmark.
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