Swept Away by Beth O'Leary

‘Swept Away’

By Beth O’Leary

Berkley 2025

Another love story is upon us, and so shiver the canonical timbers. Trollope worries away an afternoon at his postal depot, Tolstoy sits restlessly behind his silvering beard, Austen adjusts her long-donned laurels, each of them petrified at the prospect of a new romanceur coming to rival their heights. Beth O’Leary’s latest novel Swept Away presents very many questions concerning love, lust and their convoluted interplay, never daring to pry as thoughtfully or as studiously as her thronged readership deserve.

Lexi is a single woman in her early thirties who spends her nights flat against the sticky steel in regional pubs, utterly wormed of any self-respect. Zeke is a floppy, bemuscled muser with a book resting in his palms, a baronial accent lazing away on his tongue, and a fire rekindling in his eye. When these two arrange a nocturnal bonk on Zeke’s newly-purchased houseboat, readers could be understood for presuming how riotous but pitiable will be their canoodling and how brief will be their connection. But, when Zeke and Lexi fail to tether this houseboat to the Northumberland harbour, they are gushed adrift from society and must park all pleasures of the flesh if they are to ever again touch terra firma.

Throughout the first night of passion, and the first few days Zeke and Lexi spend alone, O’Leary is both insightful and often comedic. During one of Zeke’s chapters (the book passes us alternately between their respective thoughts) we see the bestial ravishings prioritised over maritime scrapes. “We’d started to get up” O’Leary writes “then kissed again, then forgotten all about it. It was an amazing night - worth breaking all my rules for. The sort of sex that makes you wonder why you ever do anything but that.” And when our clumsy corsairs rescue an impish seagull, the humour of Lexi’s impracticality will lift even the stoniest face - “I finish punching holes into the lid of the shoebox and lean over to examine the bird. It’s sort of staring at nothing, but don’t birds generally do that? What is a standard resting bird face?” Giggles are earned a second time just two pages later when the creature (given a homo sapien’s legal forename of course) must have his candidacy as a seaman ascertained - “I’m checking Eugene over as though I think I’m some sort of seagull vet. Beak: present and correct. Wings: yes, two. Talons: unnervingly sharp.”

The snobbish and the spiteful among us might see the book’s front castigating with colour and presume O’Leary has only holidaying loungers and domestic misandrists in mind when she puts pen to paper. Here they would be incorrect. During a considerable number of passages, our author shows an albeit transitory intent to swell a reader’s chest. Here’s Lexi, dappling her sections with some demotic profundity - “I swallow. I don’t want a guy who looks like that. If I’m going to distract myself, I want someone I feel comfortable with. Someone average. “ Here’s Lexi again, loosening the caps on our tear ducts when she recalls Mae, the daughter of her best friend on whose every need she waits. “I miss [Mae] so much it makes me breathless. The soft, trusting weight of her as I carry her sleeping from the car. The cadence of her brightest laugh, the one that tumbles out of her.” Even though one or two of their stunts would alarm Jason Statham, Zeke and Lexi’s difficulties are also very realistic. The lovemaking is less frequent and less operatic than has become commonplace. It is gasping, mannerly and performed at close quarters, bearing no resemblance to the lubricious bouts and emotive yelping that dominates teenage search histories.

Now the positives must stop. Beth O’Leary’s style, as may have been already gleaned from selected quotations, ranges from the soberly colloquial to the numbly neologistic. Cannibalised hyphenations are given a disreputable priority when greater, single adjectives would better serve. The cavalcades come with an awful rapidity: “I’m starting to get that Lexi isn’t really the dwell-in-a-nice-moment type”, “one of my feet popped in full Mia-in-Princess-Diaries style”, “I’m not the loads-of-friends type”, “clearly he’s on a being-brave kick right now.” Her writing is too gentle, too crazily modern and far too I-can’t-even-be-bothered-to-think. If O’Leary didn’t have many thousands of fans who’d gratefully lick the spittle from her chewing gum, and if she wasn’t obviously violating her clear capabilities, then we mightn’t be so jaded.

This critic does not wish to impute any craven rapacity on the writer’s part, but it is difficult to imagine why someone invested with momentary pazazz so often slips into tonal sloppiness, other than by assuming she shoots for a simple-minded common denominator. Swept Away could have been a mirthful yet serious take on sexualised heartlessness, romance’s volatility and the havoc wrought upon love by societal trappings. We crave longer, braver, more fiercely intelligent reasoning at chapters’ ends, and so it is here where O’Leary’s gambit fails. Those aforementioned greats with their beards and their beleaguered acolytes can rest easy in their unvisited tombs, knowing how safely distant these modern fatuities are from their sharpest achievements.

Joe Spivey is a book critic currently residing in Kingston Upon Hull