I own up to it. I was wrong.
The last time I blogged about the books I’ve
been reading I was a third of the way through Rachel Joyce’s ‘Perfect’, and it
wasn’t quite working out for me. I wasn’t liking it as much as I’d enjoyed her
previous one. I found the characters too snobby and it wasn’t moving along
enough.
But then… something wonderful happened. It all
became very tense and grotesque. The mother of the girl who the narrator’s
mother runs over in her Jaguar suddenly takes centre stage. She starts laying
on the guilt and the emotional blackmail thicker and thicker – and soon she’s
visiting the family’s posh house every day – having her nails painted, drinking
all the Warninks and having a high old time. Then she demands presents and
reparation in all kinds of ways – most incongruously in the form of a Wurlitzer
organ, which she sees in the window of a department store.
Over the course of one hot summer Beverly has
her revenge on the women who were snooty about her, and pushes everything too
far. Everyone’s life seems to fall apart before 1972 is over, and suddenly the
shadow story in the present clicks into focus and we realise what has become of
the children now they’re grown up. It was terrific in the end – a really
involving and scary book. I still think the first third is too slow, compared,
though. And the easy demonization of the non-middle class characters is a bit
problematic. Aside from that, my opinion changed around completely.
And since then I’ve been continuing with my
impromptu quest to read as many as I can of the top twenty bestselling
paperbacks of the moment. Over Easter weekend I tried out Danielle Steel for
the first time. ‘Until the End of Time’ is a split-level romance set in 1975
and the present day – and it flirts pretty heavily with the concept of
reincarnation. At first I was groaning at the clichés (especially about the NYC
fashion world) and all the unfortunate repetition and hammering home of plot
and character points… but by the
end I was enthralled by it all. I love the story of the Amish girl who
writes a wonderful novel and falls in love with her Greenwich Village editor.
It’s a surprisingly sweet, uncynical tale that springs up between the cracks in
the cliché-strewn prose.
One of my favourite discoveries in the Top 20
though, is historical novelist Dilly Court. I was once told by someone who
knew, that hers is the massively successful ‘clogs and cobbles’ genre. IE,
popular romantic historical fiction in which the characters are working class.
Something about the way, in British fiction, the class system still manifests
itself – so that, for example, working class characters in literary fiction are
often marginal, demonized, or criminal, and are deemed to belong only to
‘genre’ fiction - makes me seethe… It’s almost as if the popular / literary
binarism only exists in order to chime with out-dated notions of class…
Anyhow – Dilly Court’s ‘A Loving Family.’ It’s a
rollicking Victorian adventure – featuring orphans, happy-go-lucky detectives,
raffish rakes, and satanic schemers. As in three (three!) of the bestsellers
I’ve recently read, the lead female characters set up their own bakery and cake
shop. There are exotic Spanish ladies sold into slavery; genial strangers with
mutton chop whiskers who become guardian angels; unholy rites in underground
caves, murders and missing wills and a rash trip to Bombay by the heroine in
order to save the life of her soldier boyfriend. There’s more pluckiness in
evidence here than you could shake a pair of clogs at. All the stock characters
from every Victorian novel get to make an appearance – even the rickety-legged
urchin, and the gaga, benign old lady who sits on all the secrets and gets
coaxed out of her mucky house and crowned queen of the whole novel. I loved
every moment of it. Like
everything else I’ve been reading recently it has a terrific momentum and pace.
Everything is about that narrative drive, always moving forwards – uncovering
new secrets and twists and pitching the characters into further, delicious
complications.
All these bestsellers I’ve been reading have
very little in common in terms of genre and setting – they’re very
heterogenous. (Apart from the curious coincidence of bread-baking and
cake-making. Is there something there about comfort eating as a theme in straitened
times, and the value of old-fashioned wholesomeness, perhaps?) What they do
have in common is the unswerving fidelity to narrative drive – and hurray for
that.
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