"A lover's promise and a condom are really quite similar: both of them introduce something that wasn't there before and both of them interrupt something that would seem better left uninterrupted." Darian Leader's third book continues his exploration of the relationship between the sexes by exploring the motif of the promise, using a startling variety of textual references from Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca to the film Four Wed- dings and a Funeral. Leader is a stylish and witty writer who never stoops to pop psychology and positively despises the notion of self-help - "what it means most of the time is helping yourself to feel better about making the same mistakes all over again" - but his particular brand of analytic psycho babble is, to this reader's way of thinking, an overwhelmingly sterile exercise.
