ISBN: 0224084402 9780224084406

Category: Fiction / General

Page count: 345

The Duchess, Zarathustra and Ò' - those were the names they had for each other as they marched hand-in-hand round Hoxton in 1993. Three young iconoclasts living in glorious squalor, dole scroungin- g, shoplifting, doing drugs and swapping clothes and beds. They survive on the fringes of the Young British Artist scene convinced that they are making their lives into an artwork, even greater than those of the other great artists' mєnages і trois of the twentieth century - from Henry, June and Anais to Duchamp and his many tangled love triangles. Years later and Saul, Dot and Owen have each been blown in different directions by the explosion of that one year of debauchery and excess: Dot is now an internationally renowned artist; Saul, the mad Nietzschean visionary, has vanished from the world and is rumoured to have become a homeless drug addict; and Owen is an art critic, heavily burdened with guilt over what he feels he caused to happen to the other two. 2008. A big retrospective of Dot's work is put on and Owen is forced to face images from their past. Dot and Saul, too, are drawn back together. But as all three are reunited things become complicated - Dot has a child from a broken marriage and so their union of three is now of four. And Owen's feelings of guilt and jealousy resurface, threatening to bring them back to the conflicts that led to Dot to the brink of suicide only then to catapult her to stardom. Is the mєnage і trois a way to live? Or is it just a dream, a work of art, impossible in reality?