I spotted this novel at Costco ten days ago on a Friday evening and finished it through the weekend.
The whole story was built on a reunion dinner between two ex-lovers in a lonely restaurant at the Carmel-by-the-Sea with overarching flashbacks of their past lives six years ago. The cliffhangers were well kept until the novel's last sentence, yet I am still not 100% sure of the endings till today.
It was one of the best novels I've read in recent years.
How could these two lovers be so deadly wrong to each other? I gasped with disbelief right after I finished the book.
On the other hand, the author skillfully builds up the context to offer the consequences that led to the misunderstanding between these two highly intelligent and emotionally sophisticated CIA field agents.
The ending is so powerful and surprising.
Only if one of them had reached out to the other one earlier and honestly asked AND answered the question for each other, "why did you do that?"
But they did not. The girl abruptly left, buried all the emotions and memories deep inside, and moved to the other end of the world. The situation was so dire that she did not even think that she owed her lover any explanation.
I had more sympathy towards the other person. He was the more head over feet one in this love relationship. He suffered six years of loss and agony of not knowing why, especially on that day when he did something unthinkable in the name of the love.
Their professions prevented them from being very communicative type. Lots of agonies were transformed into silent speculations and second thoughts guessing.
That built up the climax of the finale.
A deadly game played out in one of the most idyllic and beautiful seaside small towns on this planet. And that small town happened to be my "backyard" escape place so I felt a special layer of emersion into the surroundings of the story.
Such a contrast and such a Big Bang effect at the end.
This novel was written and published back in 2015. The author claimed that he got the initial idea from watching a very bourgeois movie called the Song of Lunch. It was not until last year I stumbled into that movie online. I was instantly taken by the storyline and the artful acting between our generation's two most prominent actors. It was a swan song of the deep emotions and connections kept and revealed through a working lunch between two ex-lovers who had not seen each other for 16 years.
Another surprising finding was that this novel was already made into an Amazon movie. It came out just five days after I finished this novel, loosely based on a film I loved and first time watched 11 years after it was made.
I am glad that I unknowingly read the novel just five days before the movie version is out.
I am very skeptical about the movie version. The novel is so well written in an old-school style like John le Carré that I am afraid the movie version becomes too modern for that.
The human heart is a dark universe, and this novel tells a love story that went deadly wrong in the same tragic way as in Romeo and Juliet. However, the only difference is that all the obstacles that blocked them from living happily ever after came from the darkest corner of their hearts of the 21st century, instead of the family feud in a simpler world back in Shakespeare's time.
