My evidence? Every time they take a step to further their relationship, Maya is always the one pushing for it. Although Maya and Lochan both refer to their relationship as consensual, I don’t think that it’s portrayed that way. Personally, I don’t have a problem with consensual incest (at least in fiction – I have thankfully never had reason to test my open-mindedness with a real-life situation…), but the keyword here is “consent”. If these two things were the only issues presented with their relationship, then I don’t think I’d have had any problem with it – love is love, after all, as long as nobody’s getting hurt over it. They also acknowledge (if I remember correctly) that they can never have children together, even if they do manage to change their names and escape to a place where nobody knows they’re related.
For Lochan and Maya, this doesn’t seem to be an issue – due to their father’s absence and their mother’s near-abandonment, they don’t feel like siblings, but rather best friends, and substitute parents for their younger brothers and sister. Nowadays, however, most people find the thought of committing incest disgusting. Historically speaking, incest isn’t that unusual, and was considered acceptable (though not between siblings) up to around the middle ages (as far as I can tell). My opinion on the incest taboo is that it is something that society has created in order to reduce the prevalence of children born with recessive genetic diseases. I certainly think it’s meant to challenge its readers’ outlook on certain taboos (there’s even a scene in the book where Maya and her friend Francie talk about taboo relationships, and Maya comes to the conclusion that basically nothing is taboo anymore – except what she feels for Lochan), but there’s a lot more between Maya and Lochan than a broken taboo, so let’s talk about that. I’ve seen a few reviews that criticise Forbidden as being a defence of incest, but I don’t think it is, precisely. (And it’s set in the UK, which I think is important to mention, because the UK age of consent is 16, so they’re both of-age.) So first of all, I should tell you (just in case you haven’t actually read the book) that the focal point of this book is an incestuous relationship between two siblings a brother and sister aged 17 (18 towards the end) and 16, respectively. “My weirdness over this book is probably not for the reason you think it is…”įorbidden left me with a lot of mixed feelings, not because I didn’t like the book (because I did), but because I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the way that it addressed certain issues – and, no, I’m not talking about the incest (at least, not for the most part).
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