A Compromising Position (Carole Matthews)***

I like Carole Matthews’ way of telling multiple-viewpoint stories. I think she’s the only author I’ve ever found who’s had one first-person narrator and various people in the third person. It works well in the Chocolate Lovers series but it’s even better in this book. Maybe it’s because Emily is such a big character, you get used very early on to the fact that she features both as “I” and “Emily”. In the Chocolate Lovers series, first-person heroine Lucy is barely mentioned in the section from other people’s points of views but Emily is central to everything that goes on in the book.

It took me a while to get to like her. She spends a lot of time early on telling us how her friend Cara really isn’t normal. She does have a point about that. Cara is very New Age and into spells, massage and dreadlocks. But considering Cara has just come to Emily’s rescue by giving her a place to live when her boyfriend posted a saucy picture of her on the Internet, Emily probably should have been nicer about her.

Besides, it’s not as though Emily is so very normal herself. On the very first page of the book, she is wailing like a banshee in public. I might have been more forgiving if she was a natural crybaby but she manages to be very brave for the rest of the book even though her life is full of disasters. So the banshee wailing seems like attention-seeking to me.

Also, while I haven’t really delved into the sex lives of most people I know because I’m really not interested, I shouldn’t imagine most women spend their bedroom time dressing up in Saucy Santa outfits, writing Ho Ho Ho on their bottoms, and allowing their boyfriends to photograph it. She wasn’t to know that he was going to put it on the Internet and that her bottom was going to turn into one of the Internet’s most-viewed pages but still, I think most people wouldn’t do it in the first place. And if I’m wrong about that, I think I’d rather not know about it really.

When Emily says she’s a normal person, it’s difficult not to laugh. When she says she’s organised and competent, I found it hysterical. And then I found out she was a teacher… now I’m not saying teachers don’t or shouldn’t have a sex life but you just can’t take this book seriously.

A Compromising Position is loads of fun and Matthews really keeps you guessing. I had no idea who was going to end up with whom. Emily and Cara are both in love with Adam, whose ex-wife Laura is married to Barry but seems more inclined to share her problems with Adam. Emily’s ex-boyfriend Declan is also keen to get back with Emily, at least when he’s not enticing Cara into someone else’s hot tub.

Then there’s Chris, who is such a total typical lad, I was just waiting for him to fall in love. The fact he insisted on carrying a picture of Emily’s bottom around with him and kissing it made me wonder if he might fall in love with her. I quite fancy him actually. At least he knows what he wants from what girl (though it probably helps that he wants the same thing from all of them) and he’s honest about it. I don’t want to sleep with him though. I just want to look after him. So I’m not sure we’d get on. Then there’s this guy called Sebastian, who has connections to almost all the main characters but they don’t know he knows all of them. If they had known, this book would have been a lot shorter.

It is very funny the way Adam and Emily fall in love with each other at first sight (not that it stops Adam from shagging Cara and worrying about Laura, or Emily from considering taking up with publicist Jonathan Gold) without realising that they kind of know each other already. Adam knows Cara has a friend called Emily whose bottom has been on international news (he has seen a photograph of her but presumably he didn’t really look at her face) and Emily knows Cara fancies a guy at her work called Adam. But then they have a chance meeting in a bar when Emily’s dyed her hair (and isn’t flashing her bottom) and they don’t really talk. They just drool and Adam tells her she has sauce on her nose and Emily is so humiliated, she runs off. They then spend half the book trying to find each other. This does go on a bit long. There’s a limit to how many times Emily and Adam can narrowly miss meeting one another. When Emily finally realises who he is and she decides to jump out of the window in order to avoid meeting him, things really have got a bit silly.

So it’s definitely not a book to take too seriously. It’s quite satisfactory the way all the coupling works out in the end but there’s nothing to tell you these are the ‘right’ characters, or that they’re going to live happily every after. And it’s not all that realistic. Emily might be nice-looking but she’s thirty-two. About ten years older than most successful glamour models. And I’m sure that if I created a website and put my bottom on it, I wouldn’t start earning lots of money from it, like Declan does when he puts Emily’s nether regions on the Net. I’m not even sure how he does manage to earn so much money from it. Is it pay-per-view? Perhaps, but once the national newspapers have got hold of it, and once Chris has forwarded it to his Facebook friends, there’s no need to look at the original.

And it’s also a bit disturbing that Adam takes on a job as a porn photographer in order to prove to Laura that he can look after their son Josh when she goes to Australia to find herself. Josh takes it all in his stride – he seems to know a lot more about glamour models than Adam does – but I’m not sure Laura would be too happy if she knew about it. So Adam’s pretty much deceiving her in order to get custody of Josh, and I don’t think that’s fair. But the rest of the book is so mad, it’s hard to get too uptight over these little problems. I couldn’t ever see Emily, Adam, Cara, Laura, Josh and Sebastian as real people (Chris I believe in apart from the bottom-kissing) so it doesn’t matter what Adam does really. I was amused enough to keep reading but I didn’t care about the characters.