Two's Company (Jill Mansell)****

Two’s Company follows a celebrity family (don’t worry, they’re nothing like the Osbournes, they’re all interesting and talented people) and their numerous partners. Parents Jack and Cass have a very strong marriage that suddenly falls apart as soon as Jack meets tarty journalist Imogen. Their son Sean manages to impregnate a girl he doesn’t actually care about (well, one of the many girls he doesn’t care about) while their elder daughter Cleo (a model but quite an intelligent one) insists she’s not going to fall in love, but isn’t going to let that stop her from having fun. Their youngest daughter Sophie, by contrast, goes through the whole book without having sex once - the only men she’s interested in are the ones dying from AIDS in Africa - although she does develop a slight affection for an escaped prisoner.

It actually sounds like unoriginal trash when I put it like that – and perhaps it is. But it’s a lot of fun. The clichés are amazingly funny, and Sophie is the only major character in the large cast who doesn’t come over strongly and amusingly (too many archaeological digs and not enough character development, but she’s an isolated incident). Cass is lovely, and it’s completely understandable why all the men want to drop their trousers at the sight of her. Jack is inadequate in a surprisingly likeable way, he usually means well and he copes with Imogen admirably in the end – although I have to say I’d have admired him even more if he hadn’t got involved with her in the first place. Sean is much more of a lad than his father but even he turns out to be quite a sympathetic character because he’s so totally useless you just have to pity the poor boy - although perhaps not as much as you pity his sweet girlfriend Pandora, who has enough to worry about with that Christian name.

The bits on the side are also rather nicely done. The fact that Sean’s girlfriends don’t have a lot of character only makes it funnier, as personality clearly isn’t that important to him. Cleo meets all manner of men in her quest not to fall in love and Imogen is a pathetic bitch who is unintentionally funny. One thing I love about this book is that the celebrity status of the characters is treated quite matter-of-factly, and Mansell certainly doesn’t try to suggest that they’re any more perfect than – and certainly not that different from - their non-celebrity friends.

The only thing that really disappointed me about this book – apart from Sophie, what a waste of a lovely name – was that so much of their lives was glossed over. The book probably covers around three years, but there are long gaps where the characters change and move on, and that was a shame as I’d really have liked to know what happened to the characters in that time. At one point, Pandora’s baby jumps from being not much more than newborn to being sixteen months old – and so much must have happened in this time, not only with Pandora and Sean, but also with Cass, who has just started sleeping with her old friend Rory – and then suddenly they’ve been together for more than a year.

The book is 438 pages long, so it’s not short, but I could imagine it being twice as long and even more riveting. It could probably be stretched to the length of Penny Vincenzi’s An Absolute Scandal, which spans around two years. Long books can sometimes be a bit of a slog, but Two’s Company goes too quickly, and Mansell’s wonderful gift for comedy probably couldn’t make any book seem slow. (There was no need for the very minor character Donna to throw up into someone’s makeup box but that was about the only joke I didn’t appreciate. Pandora, with her morning sickness and appendicitis, I will forgive.)