Crystal (Katie Price)*

The people who think Katie Price (better known as Jordan) must be illiterate because she is a glamour model aren’t necessarily right. Glamour models tend not to be that highly qualified because they start work young. But there is no reason why they shouldn’t be intelligent and literate. If they have a chance at a well-paid career which they think they’d enjoy, why not take it? They can always go and get a degree when their careers are over, when they’re thirty or thereabouts. It’s true that the glamour models I’ve been in touch with seem to be poor at spelling and punctuation, but very few people use punctuation nowadays, and plenty of intelligent people can’t spell.

But the fact is that, although Price’s first novel, Angel, to be reviewed very soon, is actually not bad, Crystal has very little to recommend it.

The reason for this could be that, while Angel could have been strongly influenced by Price’s own life as a model, Crystal is outside her experience. With Crystal, the tale of a girl band who enter a fictional X Factor, Price was, perhaps, being a bit too ambitious. She had ‘ghost’ Rebecca Farnworth to help her with the ‘literary’ (this term is used very, very loosely) side of things, but the subject matter is probably not something Farnworth has experienced either. As a journalist, perhaps Farnworth is more comfortable writing about fact than fiction.

The story is about Crystal, Belle and Tahlia, the three members of a girl band called Lost Angels. They enter musical talent show, Band Ambition. Like Ben Elton in Chart Throb, Price has written about ‘fictional’ judges who are clearly very much influenced by their real X Factor counterparts. Elton’s version of the TV programme is far wittier, but Price’s characters have more depth, and are slightly more believable as people. The girls are also quite well characterised: they’re very different, and, while the clearly underlying tension between Crystal and Belle is easy to see, there is still a bond, however tenuous, between the girls that makes their shared ambition believable.

Belle is a bit of a drama queen, and it’s easy to believe that someone as selfish and hardheaded as Crystal wouldn’t have much patience with this. But the problem is, I’m mostly on Belle’s side. Belle might be a little bit bitchy at times, and her ability to twist the Simon Cowell character around her little finger is annoying, but she is still tame in comparison with Crystal.

Keeping the peace is Tahlia, Price and Farnworth’s best-written and nicest character. It’s a shame that so little of her story is shown. As the least confident of the three girls, her newfound fame is difficult from the start, but she’s not another wannabe loser, screaming for attention. When a story about Tahlia was sold to the paper, I was actually glad - I was looking forward to seeing her taking centre stage in the book. But she doesn’t. Hers is a story with the potential to fill a third of a novel easily, if not a whole novel, but Price decides to stick with Crystal. Unfortunately.

And so there is nothing to do but to wait for Crystal to become a better person, and that takes time. The plot is meandering: once the contest is over: Crystal is shunted from one place to another, and the book becomes less of a continuing story than a series of uninteresting snapshots into Crystal’s life. Not even her romances are interesting. Max is a total bastard, but that doesn’t change the fact that Crystal stole him from Belle. Apparently, Belle’s somewhat negative reaction to this is a sign of her inherent bitchiness, but how would you feel if it was you? Crystal’s other bloke, Jake, is not overburdened with personality, brains, or good taste in women, but he’s still miles too good for Crystal.

Price tries her best to win some sympathy for Crystal. While most of what happens to her is probably deserved, some of it is awful. I’m glad Crystal was able to recover to some extent, but the fact that she’s suffered doesn’t make her a nice person. Crystal isn’t a bad character, but she doesn’t work as a heroine because she’s just a horrible person. Maybe, like Jane Fallon in Getting Rid of Matthew, Price was intending to create an unlikeable protagonist who nevertheless is sympathetic, but this is a very ambitious idea for so inexperienced a novelist as Price, and it just didn’t work.