The Wedding Day (Catherine Alliott)***

Catherine Alliott is brilliant about writing comedies about rather stupid women and also brilliant at writing stories that really make you feel for the characters. But I’ve read three of her books now and all her characters seem fairly similar. The stupid heroine is in love with one man but then she meets another man who’s really horrible to her, then she starts having feelings for him instead. Actually, it’s the plot of pretty much any Mills & Boon although Alliott’s writing is a million times better than most Mills & Boon writers. So it is possible to read a number of books with exactly the same plot without getting fed up with it. But with this book, I found myself wishing for a bit of variation.

It’s not as though Alliott can’t do character. In this book especially, she has some great secondary characters. Annie, the central character, and her fiancé David might lack originality but David has a wonderfully mad and vague but terrifying and formidable aunt called Gertrude. Annie’s older sister Claire is always busy, bossy and competitive, just the sort of person I’d usually find really annoying but Alliott gives her a surprising vulnerability. The publisher who is interested in Annie’s book doesn’t appear in person but he’s a great character too. Then there are various friends and neighbours who are fascinating and amusing and Alliott takes the story off on endless twists and turns. And even when you know just where the story is going, she often throws in a surprise.

I also liked Annie’s ex-husband Adam. He does have a bit of a maturity problem (not to mention a fidelity problem) and you can’t blame Annie at all for leaving him - you actually kind of wonder why she didn’t do it sooner. But I did kind of feel he had some good qualities and I really wanted him to learn from his mistakes and end up happy, although maybe not with Annie. He was the first character in the book I really cared for and wanted to know more about. Some of the other major characters at that point seemed like lost causes and Adam didn’t… although I think Annie would argue with that.

Other characters however don’t quite work. Annie’s daughter Flora is a strange mixture of a stroppy teenager, a very young child and an adult. In some ways, this is completely realistic as everyone has different sides to their personality and there are times when you feel young and times when you feel old (not that I’ve ever felt old). But the different parts of Flora don’t quite form a coherent whole.

Annie, David, and Matt (Annie’s Other Man) don’t quite work for me either. The problem is that Annie is a bit unhinged. There’s nothing wrong with being a bit unhinged but I found it slightly worrying that she was getting married. She hardly seems to know David, she has little or no interest in the wedding (although she has somehow managed to convince herself she can’t wait) and seems to have no idea what she’s getting into. I felt as though I was older than her (she’s in her thirties so she’s much older than me) and that freaked me out a bit. I’m not used to going around feeling older than people. It always worries me to find someone, even in a book, who is considered a capable and responsible adult (unlike me) yet is obviously in need of someone to take care of them, be it temporarily or permanently. I really wanted to find Annie, look after her a bit and sort her head out. (Annie is probably now feeling very glad she doesn’t exist.)

This book also includes something I really hate to find in books. No, I don’t mean vomit although there is some and it wasn’t very nice but it could have been worse. What I also really hate is when one (or more) of the characters in the book is a writer and you have to read their work. Alliott makes us read some of Annie’s book. It is so cringe-makingly awful, it should probably be quite funny but the fact a publisher is interested in the book kind of spoils the effect. And there’s definitely a bit too much of it. But it is very cleverly done and there is a reason why Alliott makes you read it so I suppose she gets away with it.

David seemed like a perfectly lovely man but I didn’t really know what he was doing hanging around with this madwoman, let alone planning to marry her. He’s a doctor so I thought he must be setting himself up as her carer or something. Alliott does address this so she gets away with that too but it’s a good thing the book isn’t any longer. Towards the end of the book, you understand why Alliott has done certain things that just don’t make sense at first but until I found out why, I found these parts of the book very annoying.

As for Matt, he seems a little bit creepy. I can’t blame him for sneaking into Annie’s holiday home in the middle of the night, he did honestly think it was his holiday home. But shouting at Annie, getting her name wrong on purpose in insulting ways and trying to force her and her teenage daughter to leave the house immediately and go to an expensive hotel seems a bit much. Annie forgives him (she’s way too nice, she lets people walk all over her) but I still haven’t.

Alliott writes so well though, it was impossible not to become emotionally involved in the story, even though it took me a while and I might have given up on it if a) I didn’t have a blog or b) I didn’t know from experience that Alliott is such an emotionally involving writer. I wasn’t happy at all with the ending, it actually seemed completely wrong, if not dangerous and I really think Annie is in serious trouble. But if you ignore the last couple of chapters, the book would have a really exciting and interesting ending. The way Annie gets to know the characters in ways she hasn’t been able to before, the way she finds out about and comes face to face with their innermost secrets, the way she really does seem to learn from the experience and grow up a bit, made this book a (mostly) really moving and satisfying read.

On Chesil Beach (Iain McEwan)****

I hated Atonement so much, I was reluctant to give Ian McEwan another go. But he’s my boyfriend’s very favourite writer in the whole world (except me) so he told me I had to try On Chesil Beach because I’d love it. I was quite annoyed when he turns out to be right but at least it meant I didn’t have to suffer like I did with Atonement.

One of the things I hated about Atonement was that Ian McEwan copied bits from other sources. I don’t know if he’s done the same thing in On Chesil Beach or not but in a way I don’t want to know. I really enjoyed it and it will spoil it a bit if it turned out not to be an original work of fiction.

It certainly seemed original. It’s set in the fifties. Florence and Edward are on honeymoon. It’s their wedding night and they’re both virgins so they don’t know what to expect. Edward can’t wait (typical man) but Florence is a bit freaked out by the whole idea of it. It starts off with them eating their first meal alone as a married couple, then they go into the bedroom. Then we start seeing a series of flashbacks. We hear about the first time they encountered one another and the time when they finally met (these are not the same thing). We see how their relationship progressed from there and a bit about their contrasting home lives. We discover Florence went to music college to study the violin and Edward went to university and got into brawls.

The parts of the book set in the present (the wedding night) are told in chronological order but the rest is told in quite a random way. However it is very effective. The more you read, the more you unravel, the more things start to make sense. It’s only annoying when McEwan has left you at a very exciting point and then he goes off and talks about something else instead. But a lot of good authors do that.

Edward is a bit of a strange character. He turns out to be a very different character from how he seemed at the beginning of the book. He’s very polite and slightly reserved towards Florence so I thought he was quite a gentle sort of person. Then it turns out he likes getting into fights. Edward as a character is full of surprises but McEwan doesn’t reveal Edward’s character in an unrealistic way. I had no trouble believing he really was as he was being described. I wasn’t sure I liked him but I did find him very interesting.

Florence I identified with quite a lot. At first, I thought she was naturally nervous about her wedding night because she didn’t really know much about it but it turns out she is quite repulsed by the whole idea. I find this completely reasonable. I love my boyfriend and we’re very happy and, well, use your imagination, we have been together for nearly two years. But the idea of having his urinating apparatus inside me isn’t one that gets me particularly excited. And the thought of him… exploding all over me is a bit ewwww when you think about it. It’s not that I don’t get excited, it’s just I get more excited when he’s got his clothes on (or, well, my clothes on). So I really felt for Florence and McEwan described her feelings really well.

I liked the parts about music too. Often when people write about music you can tell whether they actually know anything about it or not. Like there was one book with a character who wanted to play a particular flute piece slowly. Reasonable in theory but that particular piece you have to play really fast because you can’t take breaths in the middle of the phrases. Then you get the occasional violin with frets and or a clarinet with a double reed which really does get on my nerves. (The violin does not have frets and the clarinet has a single reed.)

But I had no trouble with Florence’s being a really good, professional standard violinist. There weren’t many descriptions of it but there was nothing that stood out as ridiculous. Maybe she spent a bit more time practising her scales and arpeggios than she needed to – you do need to practise them a lot but you get to practise pieces too - but it wasn’t so much it was actually unbelievable. The descriptions of the Wigmore Hall were also excellent. It has been refurbished at least once since the book and the only place I’ve been backstage is the Green Room but it was mostly possible to imagine the Wigmore Hall, read the descriptions, know exactly what he was talking about and have no doubt that he really was talking about the Wigmore Hall.

Some of the sentences might have been just slightly longer than they needed to be but only if I’m being really fussy. I actually really liked McEwan’s use of language. It was sort of gentle, like the waves undulating near Chesil Beach. At the very start McEwan showed a slight inclination to sneer at his characters but after that he really seemed to be inside their heads rather than laughing and pointing.

There isn’t much dialogue. Most of it is descriptions. Usually this sort of thing annoys me as I love dialogue but this book seemed right without dialogue. It’s about two people who have a lot of thoughts, feelings and memories they haven’t shared – and to an extent can’t share - with one another. When a conversation is described, it’s not necessarily the words that are spoken that are the most important thing. So I really like the book as it is.

Chesil Beach is a fascinating location for a story but to an extent it’s wasted because Chesil Beach is one of the few places in the book that isn’t described in detail and also really the only part of the book where the words used in conversation become more important than the setting. There are probably many exciting stories that could be set on Chesil Beach and nowhere else but on Chesil Beach but the book On Chesil Beach could in theory have been set anywhere. There doesn’t even need to be a beach at all as far as I can see. Anywhere outdoors would do.

So in some ways I wish McEwan had set his story somewhere else as now I think writers will feel discouraged from using Chesil Beach as a setting even if they wrote a very different story because the book is so famous. But at the same time, Chesil Beach is an exciting, magical place and just the fact that it’s really there gives the story something extra.

The Other Woman's Shoes (Adele Parks)*

Adele Parks is a very popular and successful writer so I was really expecting to enjoy this book. And, to be fair, I did enjoy the first page and a half. I absolutely loved the opening line. It wasn’t an especially witty or original or exciting line but it did mention the words ‘Earl’s Court station’ so naturally I was hooked.

I also quite liked the central character, Martha. True, she wasn’t enjoying being at the tube station, which immediately shows you she’s a completely different person from me but I could identify with the not liking stairs part. Also, getting stressed over going to the hairdresser's is exactly the sort of thing I’d get stressed over (if I ever went to the hairdresser’s) and I can definitely relate to not wanting to create a scene. Unfortunately with me, scenes get created all by themselves but I can understand Martha’s not wanting it.

The blurb tells you that sisters Martha and Eliza have split up from their partners and Martha wants fun and Eliza wants a husband. But I don’t think the blurb should have told you that. The blurb should really tell you about something that happens near the beginning of the book. The blurb is your taster, the thing you’re waiting for when you start to read the book. You don’t really want to be waiting half the book for it to happen.

It’s not until about halfway through that the blurb becomes even slightly true. Martha has no interest in fun for ages and even when she is she’s more interested in the provider of the fun than the enjoyment itself. As for Eliza, she never really at any point wants a husband. She does trawl through Martha’s address book in search of a suitable man but it seems to me that all she really wants is a shag.

But that’s a problem with the blurb and Parks probably isn’t responsible for that – although if there was enough excitement in the story leading up to these events, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered what the blurb said.

One of the most important things for me in a book is the characters. I want to like them. At the very least, I want to be rooting for them. But that didn’t really happen. Martha got on my nerves so much and some of the things she does made me cringe with embarrassment. Usually, I don’t even notice when someone has done something embarrassing but seriously, I just wanted to shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see what the crazy woman was going to do next. I’d be lying if I said I’d never done anything embarrassing, everyone does it sometimes but Martha is (I hope) so much worse than me.

Martha is also completely self-obsessed. I accept that when your husband leaves you it’s probably a bit of a shock and you might well spend months weeping and wailing but after a while I stopped feeling sympathetic and I just wanted one of the other characters to shake her. The problem isn’t so much that she’s upset, that’s natural (although I’m sure she’s milking it at least a little bit) but Martha isn’t just upset, she stops showing even the smallest amount of consideration for anyone else.

I don’t usually mind when characters have emotional breakdowns. I actually rather like it. The feeling of being drawn into someone’s crisis can (at least when it’s fiction) makes very enthralling (if not strictly enjoyable) reading. I don’t mind too much when it happens in real life either. Most of the people I know have tried to kill themselves and I don’t get annoyed about that. With Martha, it just seems like self-indulgence and attention-seeking. There is no real sense of sadness in Martha’s words or actions – my sympathy was for the poor people who have to put up with her.

Even when Martha meets Jack and starts having wild sex with him, she doesn’t change. She’s still needy and demanding. I don’t blame Eliza for being convinced that Jack’s just with her for the sex. The way she behaves with Jack is so embarrassing at times, it actually hurts (I don’t see what was wrong with the Crunchie though) but it’s the way she treats Eliza that really bothers me.

Eliza, like Martha, has just lost a long-term partner, Greg. But whilst Michael has (perhaps understandably!) walked out on Martha, Eliza has taken the decision to leave herself. So she goes to her sister Martha’s house, discovers Michael has walked out and has to spend the next few months looking after Martha and her children. Martha doesn’t even consider that Eliza might be upset too and Eliza just has to push her own feelings aside and pretend everything’s fine.

Just because Eliza wanted to leave, it doesn’t mean she’s not going to be hurting. She probably did love Greg at one stage, even if she doesn’t now so she’s still lost someone she loved. And even if she’s completely happy to have left him, her life will still have changed quite a lot. That must be a lot to cope with even if you don’t have to start babysitting your sister, not to mention your niece and nephew. Maybe Martha’s problems serve as a timely distraction for Eliza but Martha really doesn’t give her much choice in the matter. Martha comes first and it seems as though she feels Eliza’s problems don’t matter. (She does kind of realise quite near the end that maybe she’s been a bit selfish but it’s a bit late by then.)

Eliza isn’t as bad as Martha. She does seem to be a very kind and patient person. But to a great extent, she’s hardly in the book. You don’t get much sense of her personality except what other people tell you. Eliza is just Martha’s live-in babysitter with almost no life of her own. Either she’s comforting Martha or she’s trying to shag one of Martha’s friends. It’s not much of a storyline.

I do like Martha’s boyfriend Jack though. He seems like a really nice, kind guy but at the same time he isn’t a total drip. Which is a shame in a way because I do like my drips but it’s not me who has to sleep with him. I can believe a lot of women would love him as he is. He’s a bit of an unrealistic character but it’s not completely impossible there are men in the world like him. Unlike Eliza, I got the impression he actually like Martha as a person – although fuck knows why.

Then there’s the dialogue. When something bad happens in real life, I think a lot of people start talking in clichés because they’re really struggling to put their thoughts into words. But when people start talking in clichés in a book or on TV it can just end up being really funny and that spoils the atmosphere a bit. Parks’ dialogue reads like EastEnders. To begin with, I didn’t mind it so much as it was making me laugh but after a while it stopped being funny and just became annoying.

The dialogue wasn’t the biggest problem though - a lot of the time there wasn’t any dialogue. Sometimes Parks will just tell you what happened without getting into all the details of what could have been a very interesting conversation. There are also a lot of anecdotes about past events which is fine in moderation but when it happens a lot, it gets in the way of the story. She’s also one of those writers who tells you what you’re supposed to think of each character. I’d rather make up my own mind really but to be fair she does say some things I agree with. I don’t agree that Martha is a wonderful, lovely, giving, kind person but I can’t argue when Parks says she’s being embarrassing.

The book also seemed to try a bit too hard to mislead the readers. It’s fine to disguise a situation a bit, for the author to describe in a way that makes you think one thing when the truth it something different. But Parks doesn’t just hint, she tells you fairly directly what’s going on, only to contradict herself later on. Sometimes I actually found I was reading back, wondering if I was going mad or something. Instead of thinking ‘oh, of course that’s how it is’ I was thinking ‘That’s not what you said before, look’.

I won’t say too much about the ending. Not that I especially want to encourage anyone to read this book but all I’ll say is that if I’d liked the characters, the ending Parks chose would have been the ending I wanted most. But that doesn’t make it the right one. In the short-term, it’s satisfying but in the long-term, I think they’re heading for divorce.

But finally, I must say something about the title. It implies a sort of role-swap for Martha and Eliza but that is another thing that never really takes place. Martha starts going out clubbing (yes, at her age!) but this isn’t so much Martha turning into Eliza as Martha trying to be her teenage self. Eliza does end up doing some of Martha’s motherly duties but that’s only because they’re pretty much forced on her.

I’m sure there are some good things about this book but the only times I weren’t bored were when I was really annoyed.