Isosceles Rules surprisingly in mid Wales

Why do Harry Potter books identify the author as "J K Rowling"? It's because her publisher advised her to be ambiguous about her gender:- "Boys don't read books by women". R A Bramhall seems to have used similar reasoning for "Isosceles Rules", though no-one would mistake that for a children's book. I fell for the trick and bought a copy. A friend had told me it was a sensitive, insightful, tragic, funny and deeply erotic account of what it's like to be an insecure 20-something girl. That's just what I found, and all the time I was reading it I imagined the author as a wise and witty woman. But then a review in the Mid Wales Journal outed "R A Bramhall" as "Richard" and revealed that he's married to Sally Bramhall of the Herb Garden Café in Llandrindod.

So I have to adjust. If a man can write such convincing female characters, I must revisit my assumptions about the differences between us and men.

As the title suggests, this novel is about triangles; love triangles. It's also about how people choose who to fall in love with. All the main actors are, in various ways, motherless, and they need to fill the gaps that a missing mother leaves. The heroine, Anna, is not literally motherless (not at first, anyway) but Mother has effectively been stolen by religious bigotry - a fire and brimstone monotheism that Anna herself rejected in her teens. Anna's latest lover was orphaned when he was only ten - both parents killed in the real-life Hungerford massacre of August 1987. Lucy the bar-maid's sluttish mother disappeared a few years later, accompanied by a brewery rep and the week's takings. Fathers are even more absent, or even more inadequate. Lucy says the only worthwhile thing her own dad ever did was divorcing the vanished slut. The result is that Bramhall's characters have entered the 21^st century having grown up in a vacuum; they have had to "develop their own moral compass", as the local Women's Institute puts it.

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"Isosceles Rules" by R A Bramhall
ISBN 978-0-9543081-2-4
Published by Sosiumi Press. Paperback. 576 pages £11.95.Available from Verzons in Middleton Street, Llandrindod or the Herb Garden Café, next to Somerfield, Llandrindod or via the internet - www.isoscelesrules.com.
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The WI provides commentary on the action - a modern Greek Chorus. But, being the WI, they cannot help sticking their motherly oars in as well. And since they are using their particular branch of the WI as cover for an ancient fertility cult their interventions are bizarre and mystical. "Shall I have to become a witch and dance naked in the woods?" Anna wonders at one pivot point in the plot. I assure you, things turn out more lethal than dirty dancing.

Bramhall tells his story only through what the characters themselves have written in all kinds of media. He allows Anna to be the character we hear most of, and he also makes her the most fluent and persuasive of all the writers. Her voice is his voice, I'm certain. All the more startling, then, to read her first-hand accounts of love-making - frank, explicit, and drawn along by her inner dialogues expressed in a breathless stream of consciousness. Erotica has never moved me this much, and Anna's embellishment on the Kama Sutra is just hysterical.