Got You Back (Jane Fallon)**

I loved Jane Fallon’s first novel, Getting Rid of Matthew. I gave it three stars at the time but I think that was mean. It’s definitely a book I still enjoy thinking about months later. It’s very funny, with three love triangle characters who are engaging, if not technically likeable. But it’s also a clever novel that turns a clichéd situation into something a bit different.

So when I saw Got You Back in the shops, I was expecting more of the same from Fallon. No matter that the plot had a similar-sounding love triangle. It was hilarious last time, so I didn’t mind having the same plot rehashed with a few differences. Not if it was funny.

It wasn’t funny. It started really well, with Stephanie finding texts from a mysterious K on her husband James’ mobile (yes, it’s two-timing James again). She discovers they’re from a woman called Katie, and she phones her, introducing herself as James’ wife – not ex-wife, as Katie thought. Katie is all for telling James she knows straight away but Stephanie decides it might be more fun to make him suffer a bit first. So when Katie dyes and styles her hair like Stephanie’s, and when both women buy identical tops, comedy does seem imminent.

But the comedy soon disappears, and it becomes yet another story about a two-timing husband who’s more in love with himself than his women, a wife who jumps straight into a new relationship the first chance she gets, and a girlfriend who would certainly have boiled the guy’s bunny if he happened to bring one home from the surgery where he works as a vet. It’s not deep enough or moving enough to be a serious dramatic story, but it’s not funny enough to be anything else.

Without all the humour, the story falls flat. Neither James, his girlfriend Katie, nor his wife Stephanie are particularly engaging characters. I didn’t like them or care what happened to him. There are some vaguely amusing moments at Stephanie’s work, where she tries to persuade various wannabes not to go to an awards ceremony with their naughty bits on show. But I wasn’t that interested, and while I could understand why Stephanie was feeling upset and stressed, the unkind and unprofessional manner in which she treated her clients was really worrying. Stephanie was extremely lucky they all happened to be nice people.

Stephanie’s workmate Natasha is my favourite character but even she’s inconsistent. One minute, she’s trying to think up an appropriate punishment for James that doesn’t involve causing GBH. The next, she’s hiding from one of her clients because she’s frightened of them. It doesn’t quite make sense. And as for Stephanie’s son Finn, I can fully understand her concerns that he might be psychotic. Given his propensity for drawing mutilated animals, perhaps it would be better if he didn’t take after James and become a vet.

Also, I find the book difficult to read. A lot of it is written in the pluperfect tense, which is quite alienating. I used to loathe books in the present tense with a passion and I’d rather have died than actually written one myself. But now I love the present tense best because everything seems so immediate. And if you do want to do a flashback you can put it into the past tense and you hardly notice the difference.

Got You Back is in the past tense which can have the advantage of sounding more literary than the present tense but it means you have to use the pluperfect if you want to make it clear something has happened before the events that have just been described. Usually this is fine as there will usually be only a couple of uses of the pluperfect - enough to get your attention - before it switches back to the preterite. But when just about every verb is preceded by ‘had’, as happens all the time in this book, it can sound really clunky.

It also really brings home to you the fact that things have already happened. The characters/author are only keeping you up to date of happenings in their life in a second-hand sort of way. Even in real life it’s not unknown for people to start talking about past events in the present tense (“So I’m standing there, then suddenly I hear this voice behind me so I turn around and there he is, and he’s looking at me, and I’m looking at him, and I’m just like in shock…”) or something like that. Then in one chapter a character might be worrying about a problem they have, and by the next chapter they’ll have moved on to a different problem, and you won’t here anything about the first problem until it’s casually mentioned later on it’s been solved. I felt a bit shut out from it all.

Getting Rid of Matthew (Jane Fallon)***

It’s the old love triangle situation. Helen is sleeping with Matthew who is married to Sophie. Helen begs Matthew to leave Sophie, but he won’t. But then he does leave her, and Helen realises that, actually, she’d have preferred it if Matthew had stayed where he was.

It’s not the greatest book in the world, but it’s very funny. Probably a laugh on every page, although there are certainly jokes that don’t quite work, such as the confusion caused by Sophie’s nickname for her stepson – a nickname that completely disappears from use once the case of mistaken identity is resolved. But most of the humour is great. Helen is not as stupid as most heroines - the ridiculous situations she finds herself in are not so much down to stupidity as to bad luck and a lamentable but nevertheless perfectly natural curiosity about the Other Woman. But then, most people would seem intelligent next to Matthew.

Jane Fallon doesn’t give many of her characters a great deal of depth, but this is probably because Helen and Matthew are shallow and selfish people. Both of them behave incredibly badly, and it doesn’t help that the wronged Sophie is far nicer than either of them, with considerably more depth and kindness than both of them put together.

Matthew is irritating, clingy, and a total baby who cries too much - and I usually think it’s cute when guys cry. His inability to stay faithful to Sophie must also be mentioned, although, it has to be said, he does seem to stay faithful to Helen once he’s moved in with her. But what he really needs is a mother, not a wife or girlfriend.

Helen behaves in a way that probably amounts to stalking Sophie (this happens after Matthew has left her), and spends the whole of their resulting friendship telling lies. Helen keeps a list of people she hates which is scarily long, and some of her reasons for disliking people are irrational. But it’s difficult not to feel sympathy for Helen when her best friend Rachel is too busy having sex to make time for her. No wonder Helen gets in such a mess when the only person being friendly to her (apart from the embarrassingly affectionate ‘Helen from Accounts’) is Sophie.

So, in making these very ordinary and rather shallow people so amusing and even, eventually, likeable, Fallon’s novel is really quite clever. Helen and Matthew are far from perfect, and Fallon makes this very clear, but you do end up liking them for it - Helen because she does at least seem prepared to learn from all her mistakes; Matthew because he probably would learn from them if only he had the maturity. (Matthew seems to be the standard name for immature men in chick lit: see also The Birds and the Bees when I post that review.)

Sophie isn’t perfect either, but she comes very close in the circumstances. I love her even though she's involved in the book’s two least-amusing moments, not one but two v-scenes. (Chick litty Sophies, in case you were wondering, are absolutely lovely, if you can overlook a tendency to throw tantrums in public places.) Fallon’s Sophie is intelligent, although her overly (but endearingly) trusting nature does mean she fails to notice that her new best friend ‘Eleanor’ is actually the woman her husband ran off with.

So the novel is very amusing, cleverer than it seems at first, and very enjoyable. It also ended in the way I was hoping it would. But if you want a meaty, satisfying read with strong characterisation and a main character who isn’t in with a chance of being arrested for stalking, this probably isn’t the book for you. If you don’t want those things, which a lot of people don’t, it’s perfect.