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PATTI DAVIS
Bondage

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Warner Books, London, 2000
(price: £5.99; 374 pages)

first published in the USA by Simon & Schuster in 1994

The blurb on the back:

Sara was used to being in control. When it came to sex, she knew what men wanted and knew how to call the shots. But meeting Anthony changed all that, changed the way she felt about herself and the way she felt about sex.
Suddenly she is the blushing schoolgirl, unable to resist the overwhelming desire she feels for him, powerless to curb her growing obsession, Anthony shows her a world where sex is as dark as it is exciting, where she is encouraged to step over her own limits and explore the frontier between pleasure and pain. Mild at first, their sex-games become increasingly disturbed as Anthony seeks from her the ultimate surrender. But Sarah discovers she does have limits – and nothing destroys passion like a betrayal of trust…
An erotic thriller both shocking and compelling, Bondage fearlessly explores the boundaries of sexual obsession while exposing the nature of our most secret desires.

opening lines:
Sometimes we turn a corner in our lives and everything changes.

Patti Davis, of course, was best known as the daughter of Ronnie and Nancy Reagan. So the idea of her writing a novel about an S&M relationship is irresistible. Once you get past the idea, however, and start to encounter the reality, you realize just how eminently resistible it all is.

This is essentially an airport blockbuster, and I suppose it’s no better or worse than most such products – I don’t know enough to judge it on those terms. But as a psychological study of the nature of sado-masochism, it’s rubbish. The central female character has a certain realism, at least in her background, but the film director with a leaning towards dominance is nonsense. At least he is from my perspective and my experience. Maybe Ms Davis was drawing him from real life and maybe Californian sadists are a horse of a different colour altogether, but I thought he was absurdly one-dimensional.

And the sex scenes fail entirely to work as porn. It's an 'erotic thriller' in the same sense that Shannon Tweed movies are: i.e. it's not erotic and it's not thrilling.

ARTISTIC MERIT: 1/5
ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: 1/5
HIPNESS QUOTIENT: 1/5

try this instead...

The Slave
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