Book review: Scarlet Heels: 26 stories about sex.

Bryan James reviews Scarlet Heels.

SCARLET HEELS
26 stories about sex
Rachel McAlpine
CCPress, $29.95, pbk

I have been an admirer of Rachel McAlpine's various writings for many years, so I was not surprised that in her latest book, a collection of short stories about sexual experience, Scarlet Heels, to find the quality of her work undimmed.

In the realms of lighter fiction romance is very often the chief theme but romance figures only as a marginal consequence in these stories.

Most of them are indeed about sex and all its many hilarities and complications, and very amusing many are, too; but what gives them real quality is that each is about sex as it is experienced by women, and furthermore, several are about older women recalling their very surprising youthful adventures.

McAlpine uses the device of the interviewee answering questions from a hidden interviewer to elicit recollections from her subjects.

It works quite well, too, since all the stories are therefore told in the first person, giving them the flavour of immediacy.

The experiences recounted range from sensuous gardening (you ought to try it in this weather) to personal heroism in the service of the fine arts.

Most curiously, several of the voices seem to involve the older women of Christchurch which, when I lived there, certainly hid any swinging qualities from its callow youth.

I suspect this is McAlpine's little joke.

The subject will sell lots of copies of Scarlet Letters but it ought to sell well on its literary merits alone.

Few New Zealand authors have ventured more than tentatively into sex as a fictional subject and none have done it so well or as positively as McAlpine has in this collection.

The collection is supplemented by McAlpine's poems, the flavour of which might be best epitomised by these lines from "OK":

Melt me to champagne
again, again.

- Bryan James is the Books Editor.