An Absolute Scandal (Penny Vincenzi)**

The only scandal is that this book was published in the first place. Oh, there were some bits I loved - Blue Horton is one of the most gorgeous heroes ever – but NO book needs to be this long. It might have worked as a trilogy – it was good enough for Tolkien, after all – but you don’t need this many storylines. I can usually remember who everyone is without referring to a Dramatis Personnae but I practically needed to write notes in order to keep track of who was doing what with whom.

The Blue/Lucinda/Nigel storyline was lovely – no complaints about that one except I wanted Blue for myself. Their story alone would probably have made a novel of reasonable length, and possibly one with five stars instead of two. Lucinda is an adorable, innocent Sloane Ranger who married Nigel because she couldn’t imagine anything could be nicer than marrying someone so kind, gentle, rich and upper class. Then she meets the sexy, working class (but rich) Blue who probably was just after a quick one to start with, but he falls in love with commendable speed and is absolutely lovely apart from being a little bit immature and not very good at controlling his emotions. Just my type.

Married couple Elizabeth and Simon are both very strong and interesting characters. In case you’re wondering, Elizabeth doesn’t have much of a social life - as she realises at the end of the book - but there is something very powerful and commanding about her. You feel that if she wanted a social life, she’d go out and get one right now. Simon has a sex problem. Everyone else goes on about how charming he is and I suppose they’ve got a point, but the thing that really caught my attention about Simon is what a pervert he is. In a likeable sort of way.

Flora Fielding is a matriarchal, magnificently terrifying grandmother, and I did like the way her less than posh daughter-in-law Debbie was allowed to be intelligent – not that she always makes this obvious. Debbie’s heart is in the right place, but she is the sort of person who becomes very irritating after a while, so perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to put her in an 800 page novel. But her husband Richard is such a bossy, toffy prat, I think I’d be a bit whiny as well if I was married to him. (Hang on, I’m a bit whiny already.)

But there must be a good fifteen ‘main’ characters, and I can’t help thinking it would have been a stronger book with a more manageable number of storylines. It's great the way Elizabeth and Simon’s posh daughter Annabel is expelled from school and then decides to be a hairdresser. Brilliant idea. But we didn’t need to hear all about her relationships too. There’s enough going on already, and her boyfriend Jamie is, frankly, boring – although his bonkers snobby mother Frances is so much like someone I know, she ended up being quite funny. Catherine Morgan is clearly a lovely person, and very useful as a plot device, but having her back story as well just made things even more complicated.

Novels with multiple points of view can be fascinating – just some examples from this blog are The Girls, Getting Rid of Matthew, A Hidden Life and The Chocolate Lovers’ Diet. But there are also several unsuccessful examples as well – like Chart Throb, The Nanny and Ten Days in the Hills. On the whole (although certainly not exclusively), the more ‘protagonists’ there are, the less I’ve enjoyed the book. (Yes, I know you can’t really have more than one protagonist, but ‘polyagonist’ sounds silly.) When the characters are quite similar, it’s hard to tell them apart. When they’re very different, it’s difficult not to have favourites, as well as characters you really don’t like – and it’s inevitable this will lead to the frustrations of having too much of those you dislike, and not enough of those you love.

The main plot is based around Lloyd’s of London. Not the bank, apparently: I never did work out quite who they were which apparently means I’m even less intelligent than Lucinda (which is good news in that I might have a chance with Blue). But I think they’re something to do with insurance, and they have ‘syndicates’ of very rich people who receive a share of the money when Lloyd’s is going well, but owe Lloyd’s money when things are going badly. The Names (the members of the syndicate, I think that means) are supposed to be really rich people who can afford to pay several thousand pounds a year if things go badly, but because of some dirty dealing, a lot of the people in the syndicates really can’t afford it – and indeed, even the rich people are struggling, having to sell at least one of their houses, and even being forced to send their children to state school, which is beyond terrible. The Names therefore band together and discuss what they can do about Lloyd’s – apparently, even if they resign from being a Name, they still have to pay the money for the rest of their lives.

It’s all very complicated and rather boring, but the main problem with this idea is that it never seems to be resolved. Most of the ‘polyagonists’ do have their situations resolved in one way or another, and not always in a good way, but it doesn’t solve the problem for everyone. As far as I can see, this means that the efforts to fight Lloyd’s as a group as failed, which is a shame when so much of the plot has been devoted to this. Perhaps this is the realistic ending, and perhaps one of Vincenzi’s points is that there are more important things in life than money, but it is a bit annoying that something so important, at least in the beginning, is never really brought to any sort of conclusion.

Then there’s all the vomiting. Maybe, as an emetophobe, I’m slightly biased against this, but it does seem to happen to almost everyone in the book far more often than is healthy. The morning sickness is, I suppose, acceptable; the stomach bugs are very useful for keeping wives away from their lovers (although I do wish I’d been spared the details), and the drunkenness is certainly amusing to some people, if not me. But the way everyone appears to do it when they get stressed is totally unacceptable. Not only is this extremely uncomfortable reading for emetophobes, it shows a distinct lack of imagination on the part of the author. There are many ways in which people might react to stress, and considering that all Vincenzi’s characters have such different personalities, they should also have different reactions. There was a bit of crying and shaking, which was nice, but a bit more fainting and tantrums and eating chocolate would have made a real difference.

Vincenzi’s lack of imagination also extended to the way the men looked at the women. All the men seemed to be leg men, which really isn’t that realistic. Just because Lucinda and Debbie and Felicity and God knows who else happen to have great legs, it doesn’t mean their legs have to be pretty much their only good feature. There are more leg men in this book than I’ve met in my whole life. I’ve had all kinds of blokey conversations with my guy mates, but I think the closest we’ve got to discussing which girls have the best legs is when we’ve wondered which girls are sufficiently flexible to perform the entire Kama Sutra (apparently, I am).

And then there’s the fact Simon likes ‘popular’ opera. Fair enough, but this seems to include Beethoven and not Mozart. I would expect operas like The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro to count as popular. And Beethoven only wrote one opera, Fidelio, which is hardly ‘easy listening’: it’s got a role for a Heldentenor. It’s not all that popular either.

Also I don’t think there is a McDonalds opposite High Street Kensington. The Tube station in question isn’t mentioned by name, but I’m pretty sure this is the only Tube station near Kensington Gardens which is one stop from the Central Line and ‘on the way to’ Piccadilly Circus – apart from Bayswater, but that’s only five minutes up the road from Queensway (which is on the Central Line, so you’d have to be really stupid to go to Bayswater in those circumstances). But perhaps there was a McDonalds opposite High Street Kensington in 1990.

There are definitely parts of An Absolute Scandal where you want to keep on reading because there are loads of interesting things going on, and you do want to know how things work out. But after a while, you stop getting that excited because the book is so anticlimactic. Vincenzi will often open a paragraph by saying something very dramatic, but after she’s told you that, there’s almost not much point in reading the rest of that section because you know what’s going to happen. Another annoying habit of hers is ending a chapter at a crucial point, but then not going back to those characters for days, even weeks later, when the crisis is long over.

But Blue is in it so I’ll forgive Vincenzi almost everything.