Chloe Hooper's marriage plot

Liese Campbell has an arrangement for the weekend: to stay with rich farming heir Alexander Colquhoun at his country pile in western Victoria. Liese, an English architect, works at her uncle’s real-estate business in Melbourne. Alexander is a client interested in property – and in Liese. The luxury apartments she shows him are the foundation for a relationship that satisfies both their desires and Liese’s financial problems, as Alexander pays for her time. Both players understand the rules of the game – or so they think.

When Liese decides to leave Australia, Alexander invites her to his ancestral home for the weekend. Built on acres of farmland and hours from civilisation, it’s clear that Alexander sits on a fortune – and Liese will be generously rewarded for her company. But with no phone reception and nobody aware of her whereabouts, Liese soon realises that a new game has begun.

Speaking from her home in Melbourne, Hooper says The Engagement is “a psychological thriller about sex and money. In a way I see it as a telling of the perennial gothic storyline, which is that of a forced engagement. I love books like Rebecca and Jane Eyre, where there’s a woman navigating the mysteries of a house and, in a way, herself.”

The Engagement is Hooper’s third novel – her first novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002 and her second, The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island, was based on Hooper’s investigation for the Observer about the Aboriginal Doomadgee case (she is also a freelance reporter). The Tall Man won seven literary awards in Australia, but The Engagement is Hooper’s first foray into the literary thriller genre in the UK.

The desolate landscape that makes Liese so powerless in The Engagement is an important part of the novel, and Hooper stayed in some of the private houses in Western Victoria, where the novel is based. “There are these pretty amazing mansions which are in very isolated spots. [They] were built to replicate the stately homes of England, and often the descendants of the wool kings who built the properties still live there today, so they're quite gothic places,” she says.

“Nowadays it’s hard to find a house to be trapped in where you couldn’t just open the window and wave down a taxi, somewhere isolated where a mobile phone wouldn’t be working.”

Hooper says the Victorian gothic novel was a big influence when writing The Engagement: “In a way I was trying to recast a gothic novel in modern times. [Liese] has been living the modern life and she finds herself in debt. What is debt but a pretend life? It’s a case of: ‘I have all these things that I can’t afford; this is who I am, or should be.’ I think that in her attempts to commercialise herself she finds herself in this Jane Eyre fantasy that she can’t get out of. I guess that the house signifies domesticity, and in a way I think this is a book about a woman who is very ambivalent about relationships.

“I think that the story of a forced betrothal is often about ambivalence. Marriage, or nowadays domestic partnership, is on some level a way that women have been able to live out their desire for this ritual and also their fear of it. I can relate to that ambivalence and fear of walking down the aisle, so it became a thriller based around that. There are good reasons for men and women to have the hairs on the back of their neck stand up – a third of marriages end up in divorce.”

Hooper, who has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, says that the most accurate description of The Engagement was when somebody said it “reminded them of a psychological box of mirrors. You tilt it one way and this side’s the truth, and you tilt it the other way and you can read things a different way. The protagonists are playing a game with each other, and I think the book plays a game with the reader as well.”

The Engagement by Chloe Hooper is published by Jonathan Cape.