‘Permanence’ by Sophie Mackintosh

The premise of Permanence was attention-grabbing: a couple engaged in a secret affair suddenly wake up in an apartment in a strange city populated entirely by fellow adulterers, all living openly together. It sounded like the setup for a surreal, sci-fi-inflected exploration of desire and morality.

What I got instead was particularly different and a commentary on forbidden love and the strain of trying to maintain two competing lives. The novel is less interested in the mechanics of its alternate reality than it is in the emotional instability that comes with secrecy, longing and unequal commitment.

One of my biggest hurdles was Mackintosh’s decision to forgo quotation marks. I know this style works for some readers, but I always find it makes dialogue harder to follow and creates an unnecessary distance between me and the story. Combined with prose that is relatively restrained rather than richly descriptive, I found it difficult to become fully immersed in the world Mackintosh was building. Given the novel’s unusual premise, I wanted a little more texture and detail.

The central relationship was also a bit flat. Clara and Francis both felt intentionally unlikeable, though perhaps that’s the point? Clara is entirely invested in the affair, desperate for something more permanent and meaningful, while Francis enjoys the luxury of having both a family life and a secret one. Their dynamic captures the imbalance often present in affairs, but I never quite believed in what drew them together in the first place. Beyond a shared encounter in a gallery and the recurring motif of a painting that seemed loaded with symbolic significance, their connection felt underdeveloped.

That said, I did find some of Mackintosh’s ideas compelling. I particularly liked the notion that the couple could be pulled from this alternate reality whenever they hurt one another or became emotionally distant. It’s an effective metaphor for the fragility of relationships built on secrecy, desire and fantasy. The world itself may not have been explored as deeply as I hoped, but the rules governing it cleverly reinforced the novel’s themes.

Permanence is a short book, yet I found it surprisingly difficult to get through. I never seriously considered abandoning it, but I was relieved when I reached the end. Mackintosh’s writing isn’t bad by any means; rather, the novel felt slightly mis-sold. The intriguing speculative premise suggests one kind of story, but the book is ultimately far more interested in the emotional realities of infidelity than the strange world it creates.