Bruising sex and stalkerish games

Second Life by SJ Watson (Doubleday, £14.99)

SJ Watson likes to take hold of his readers in much the same way his handsome but creepy male characters take hold of his female protagonists. The author confines us to one room, steals our daylight hours and makes us doubt everyone we know and everything we’ve been told.

Many readers of Watson’s debut, Before I Go to Sleep (2011), an amnesia-thriller about a woman whose memories are wiped each day, experienced light-headedness as they reached the end. It was recently turned into a (so-so) film with Nicole Kidman and I wouldn’t be surprised if this follow-up gets similar treatment.

Julia is a fortysomething housewife and once-celebrated photographer who now contents herself with family portraits. She lives in leafy Islington with her older husband, Hugh, and their adopted son, 14-year-old Connor, whose birth mother is Julia’s younger sister, Kate.

The two sisters have drifted, with Kate leading a secretive existence in Paris. But Julia’s own life hasn’t always been suburban barbecues and trips to the theatre. Her twenties were misspent in druggy Berlin, where a certain incident with her ex-boyfriend Marcus (the subject of her most famous photograph) left her feeling guilty “for not being the person he thought I was”.

Nevertheless, she suppresses these feelings until Kate is murdered in a Paris alley. Dissatisfied with the police investigation, Julia determines to learn more about Kate’s life before she died. Once she discovers that Kate met men for sex online, she becomes convinced that one of them might have murdered her sister.

But not for long. Before she knows it, Julia is drawn into this sexual hinterland. She hooks up with a shady character called Lukas and falls into a demeaning affair based on bruising sex and stalkerish games. And it’s at this point that Second Life erupts into a sort of Fatal Attraction for the digital age — but with a crucial twist.

Watson’s speciality is female protagonists who, just as they lose trust in everyone around them, have a mirror held up to their own dubious behaviour. He’s a master at turning the screw, but I’m not sure I like the way his novels punish women for fulfilling their sexual fantasies.

Still, Watson has hit on something sinister and true with Second Life — truer, indeed, than anything in his high-concept debut. We are now happy to reveal our deepest feelings to strangers and yet remain closed off to the people we see every day. We are also made vulnerable by our own friends and family revealing our personal habits online, often without us knowing it. Facebook has a lot to answer for.

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