No Dress Rehearsal (Marian Keyes)**

I love Marian Keyes. I do. And she can write about death very well. No Dress Rehearsal was another great idea, but it kind of fell a bit flat, and I was left wondering what the point of it was.

The very short book – just seventy-nine pages long - tells the story of Lizzie, who dies in an accident but fails to realise she’s dead. When her partner ignores her, she assumes it was because of the row they had the morning before she died, but being ignored by everyone else seems inexplicable – until two people show up in her office, and tell her she’s dead.

It’s a great idea. I’ve read about people not realising they’re dead, but never from the point of view of the dead person.

But the book doesn’t work for me. One thing I have said about Keyes’ longer novels is that it often takes me several chapters in order to get into the story. Rachel in Rachel’s Holiday is a pretty horrible person to begin with, so it took me quite a while to learn to like her. Probably more than seventy-nine pages. I had a similar problem with Lizzie - she just didn’t seem terribly nice. As the book was so short, I didn’t really have time to get to know her. Some parts of the book were told from the point of view of Lizzie’s friend, Sinead. But I didn’t really like her either. She was okay, but a bit of a doormat, and her storyline didn’t interest me very much – it wasn’t nearly as original as Lizzie’s.

The book is, of course, wonderfully written, and there was a bit of humour – more than you’d expect from a book with a death theme, although anyone wanting to see bereavement and comedy put together effectively might prefer to read Catherine Alliott’s A Married Man.

But No Dress Rehrearsal just didn’t quite work. Not for me, anyway. This is possibly because it is aimed at adults who have trouble reading - but I would say an adult who has trouble reading needs a good book a lot more than I do. I'm not going to give up on reading because one book (okay, more than one!) disappointed me. This book could be making people decide whether they take up reading or not. Reading can probably enhance everyone's lives if they find the right book - so a book like No Dress Rehearsal really needs to be good. But then I am the fussiest person in the world, so maybe this book works really well!

Rachel's Holiday (Marian Keyes)*****

I didn’t like Rachel’s Holiday at all until I was quite a way into it, but I loved it by the end. A lot of people talk about Marian Keyes’ humour and warmth and great characters, and all those things are demonstrated in this book. But one of the things I really like about books like Rachel’s Holiday, Watermelon and Anybody Out There is that Keyes is not afraid to create heroines that some people might find difficult to empathise with. And maybe the fact that Angels, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married and particularly No Dress Rehearsal left me cold could be more of a sign of my failure to appreciate such an imperfect heroine than Keyes’ inability to work a miracle every time.

With Rachel’s Holiday, Keyes takes risks. Rachel is a horrible person. I have no real problems with the fact that she’s a drug addict. That in itself doesn’t make her a bad person, although most of her undesirable personality traits are probably related to her dependence on drugs. But I’ve met some drug addicts who are very nice, and there are also plenty of nice drug addicts in this book.

But Rachel is a bit of a bitch. She’s also a total slag. And most of the worst things about her, you don’t even know about until the book’s half-over. She’s smug and superior and shallow. It does seem a bit harsh in the beginning when her family packs her off to rehab. After all, the book is told from Rachel’s point of view, so it’s quite easy to believe her when she says she’s not an addict. In retrospect, I admire her for emptying her valium tablets down the toilet. That can’t have been easy.

I didn’t like Rachel at all, but drugs can affect your personality, so I was prepared to give her a chance - and not stop reading in disgust. And I ended up enjoying the book a lot. I don’t know how realistic it is, and I’m sure that rehabilitation, like counselling, is a very individual thing, and different people will respond differently to the many different approaches. But it was easy to believe that the approach used on Rachel was one that would have an effect on her.

The other characters are great. One good thing about landing your heroine in rehab is that you can put just about any character you like in your story, and it doesn’t matter that Rachel wouldn’t normally hang around with them. Trapping a group of strong and mismatched characters together can be really funny. And also really touching, when you see them learning to get along despite everything. Look at all those comedies set on a desert island. Look at Big Brother. Keyes has filled her desert island with some wonderful characters, and they all have believable stories. She’s also not afraid to make fun of psychiatrists a bit. And quite right too. Most psychiatrists are madder than their patients.

So it’s worth a read – but you need a bit of patience. Rachel has good qualities if you can find them, and the book is full of humour and great characters. And while the ending might be predictable, the twists and turns are not.

Watermelon (Marian Keyes)*****

This is the first book about the delightful Walsh family. While it isn’t quite as original as Anybody Out There, it is still an amazing book, and a lot of fun. Claire, the oldest of the five sisters, is witty and sparky with a wonderfully macabre sense of humour. It’s not easy to create a character who is humorous yet miserable. But Marian Keyes has done it.

Claire is very immature for twenty-nine. I don’t think I know anyone who is less mature than me, and one of my friends is eleven. But Claire is definitely more immature than me. She is also quite vulnerable and unsure of herself, but at the same time, she is very socially confident. Extremely friendly, but extremely miserable. Yet you never feel, Oh for God’s sake, woman, it’s not that bad.

It’s not as though Claire has no reason to feel unsure of herself. Just hours after the birth of her daughter, her husband James tells her he’s leaving her for their neighbour, Denise. Of course, Claire was very stupid to marry someone called James in the first place. We all know what fictional Jameses are like. But, as Claire seems to be completely unaware that she is no more than a product of Keyes’ imagination, and has no real life outside the pages of Watermelon and its sequels, it’s an understandable mistake.

Her family are all here apart from Maggie, the most disappointing of the sisters and the heroine of Angels. The mysterious Rachel is also absent (the more I hear about her, the more I look forward to reading Rachel’s Holiday, considered by many to be Keyes’ best book). Anna (who stars in Anybody Out There) drifts around sweetly and vaguely in search of voices from the beyond. The youngest, Helen, is enchantingly ignorant of such things as the need for studying when at university; the fact that her sisters’ clothes do not also belong to her, and other people’s feelings. (OMG, apart from the clothes thing, she could be me.)

It’s a long book, almost five hundred pages, but well worth it. All Claire is doing is recovering from James’ defection and trying to come to terms with being a mother. But it’s gripping stuff. Apart from one small slow bit, there’s a real sense of pace. The fact that sexy, caring Adam seems to like her so much only improves things. Claire’s baby, Kate, is a surprisingly strong character. Claire interacts with her and learns to understand her feelings and needs. She isn’t the best mother in the world, but she’s undoubtedly trying, and her difficulties probably aren’t that unusual - even among mothers whose husbands haven’t run off with bitches called Denise.

Claire does appear to be suffering from schizophrenia, but it’s so hilariously written, it’s difficult to feel seriously worried about it. She not only has conversations with parts of her brain, she has security guards running around trying to throw out unwelcome thoughts. But that doesn’t matter. Why should it? It should only be a problem if the voices are telling you something bad. And the voices (and security guards) in Claire’s head often make a lot more sense than she does. We should all get some of those.

Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married (Marian Keyes)***

Lucy Sullivan is nothing like a Lucy should be. I’ve got no problem with Marian Keyes breaking the traditions of naming – her Daniel isn’t much like a Daniel either – and besides, this book might have been written before the traditions were established. But if she had been more like a Lucy should be, the book might have worked a lot better.

This is a very funny book with some great characters and some really good twists. So I can completely understand why people love it. But for me the problem with the book is that Lucy isn’t a very nice person. She can be really nasty. Her mother obviously isn’t the nicest person in the world either, but it doesn’t mean Lucy should speak to her with such loathing and disrespect. Yes, Mrs Sullivan might deserve it, but Keyes really doesn’t go deeply enough into their relationship to make Lucy’s behaviour seem understandable, never mind acceptable.

To begin with, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married seems to be telling the story of three flatmates in search of love. We follow Lucy, stupid Charlotte, and the bossy, bitchy and wonderfully characterised Karen, a Scot who lives up to the stereotype of her nation beautifully. Lucy is supposed to be the nice one they can’t live without. She does deal with them both very tactfully for the most part, but that’s not enough to make me like her. Karen, not Lucy, is the one you like despite everything. Charlotte is the one you can’t help loving because she’s so sweet. Charlotte’s many imperfections slip your mind to the extent that you think she doesn’t have any.

Lucy is supposed to play a similar mediatory role with her three workmates. Keyes keeps on reminding us that Meredia is the obese one, and as the book is told from Lucy’s point of view, it’s one more reason to see Lucy as a bit of a bitch. There’s so much more to Meredia - a lovely, warm girl with an endearing enthusiasm for life – than her weight. Megan is an Australian bitch who is constantly at loggerheads with Meredia, but she doesn’t seem too much of a bully as Meredia can stand up for herself pretty well. It’s interesting that the two 'bitches', Megan and Karen, aren’t-English - although Keyes is Irish, and the Irish characters are even worse.

The book starts off as a perfectly acceptable comedy about finding – and keeping – a boyfriend. But then the story take a serious turn. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it would have been more effective if some darker overtones had been there from the start. It’s difficult when the genre suddenly changes halfway through. There’s a section where Lucy goes home to take care of her mentally unwell father. There’s definitely no comedy here, and nor should there be with a subject like this, and it’s probably the part of the book where Keyes’ writing is at its most vivid. But it doesn’t really have any place in what started off as a comedy. Keyes’ Anybody Out There combines comedy and tragedy really well, but it is a sad book with funny parts, and it stays that way throughout. Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married is a comedy that suddenly becomes a tragedy.

There are some great moments in this book. Like when Lucy does a runner in the middle of a date (the guy deserves it), and we get to see the guy’s reaction, in delicious detail. There’s the time Charlotte develops an interest in psychology. It’s also lovely when Meredia finds a guy. And it’s certainly a relief when Lucy finally meets her man – he’s not the greatest, but she gets no more than she deserves.

Angels (Marian Keyes)***

After reading Marian Keyes’ wonderful Anybody Out There, I was really excited to find out there were other books about Anna’s sisters. There are actually four in all, and reviews for Watermelon and Rachel’s Holiday will be posted when I get round to writing them. Angels tells the story of Maggie, the second of the five sisters. Maggie has grown up being the good girl, but she suddenly starts questioning whether this is something she really wants. So she leaves her husband Garv, and heads off to Los Angeles where her best friend Emily is trying to be a Hollywood scriptwriter.

It’s not a bad book at all, but a disappointment in comparison with the others. Maggie is, at least for me, by far the least likeable and the least amusing of the sisters. While it does sometimes take a while to learn to like Keyes’ characters, Maggie is someone I never really liked.

She’s just not a very nice person. She spends most of her time in Los Angeles getting drunk and sleeping with various people, and it never seems anything other than desperate and embarrassing. She’s self-obsessed, thoughtless, and a total slut. Or that’s the way it seems. Okay, yes, she thinks her husband’s having an affair, and she has just lost her job, and that’s enough to make anyone go a bit mad, but Maggie seems so neurotic and selfish all the way through the book, it’s much too easy to believe the affair is in her imagination and the sacking was deserved.

It has to be said, she gets into the bad girl lifestyle with no trouble at all, and maybe she seems happier and more alive when she’s being bad, but not really in an attractive way. And you just think: great, she’s found her true calling. She’s happier now. Let’s just leave her there and read another book.

Once we start getting flashbacks to Maggie’s life before she left Garv, her behaviour starts to make a bit more sense, and I wasn’t totally unsympathetic to her after that. But instead of her history seeming like a reason for her to go to Los Angeles, it seemed more like a reason for her to go home. As soon as possible. Ideally before she does something else stupid. She’s not going to solve the problem by sleeping around. She really isn’t.

Keyes is usually magnificent at characterisation, and her books are usually full of wonderful people, but there aren’t really any here. Maggie’s friend Emily is amazingly saintly, considering the crap she puts up with from Maggie – surely the last thing she wanted was Maggie moving into her flat and making demands on her time when she has a script to write. Maggie somehow gets involved in all aspects of Emily’s life, muscling in on her work and her social life, and ends up monopolising them completely. The friendship between Maggie and Emily never quite rings true for me. They don’t really have much of a rapport, and they barely seem to share any common interests besides getting drunk. Emily is a workaholic and Maggie is a sexaholic, and it’s difficult to see why they’re friends.

The flashbacks provide a bit of plot, but the main story seems more like a series of adventures. All Keyes’ books are full of adventures, but there’s usually a sense of heading towards something. But not here. The best parts are when Maggie’s bonkers family gets in touch.

But the rest of the series really is great.

Anybody Out There (Marian Keyes)*****

If Lucy in the Sky was the book that started me reading again, Anybody Out There was the book that made sure I didn’t stop. It is part of a series of books about five sisters, and, while it is not strictly a sequel, the beginning would have had more impact if I’d read about Anna before her depression in Marian Keyes’ previous books. Keyes’ wit, although undeniably brilliant, sometimes seems out of place in such a serious novel, and, to begin with, I didn’t feel nearly as close to Anna as I wanted to.

But that didn’t last. Anybody Out There is one of the most gripping and moving books I’ve ever read. Even though a lot of it is about makeup. Anna’s depression is realistically portrayed, and she is a loveable character once you’ve got used to the sudden switches between her deep unhappiness and her humorous way of looking at the world where she doesn’t sound depressed at all. But this is realistic too: you can have depression and a sense of humour at the same time. The only depressed people I’ve met who didn’t have a sense of humour probably never had one.

The book is full of twists and turns that I never expected, yet everything seems perfectly right once it’s happened. It was the sort of story where I wanted a perfect resolution, yet I felt this would be untrue to the spirit of the book if this actually happened. I won’t say how Keyes dealt with this problem, but it was ultimately one of the most satisfying books I have ever read.

Keyes’ characters are all great. Anna and her former lover Aidan have a great relationship that is very romantic, but never becomes embarrassing to read about. Some of their encounters are extermely amusing, starting from their very first meeting. But Keyes never lets you forget that it’s about to go wrong.

There are also a couple of hilarious subplots featuring Anna’s friend Jacqui and delightfully mad sister Helen. Their stories are very different from Anna’s, but do not seem out of place, and are, in many ways, a welcome relief from the misery, as well as a reminder that the whole world keeps going even when, to Anna, it seems like it’s over. These storylines also give Keyes the opportunity to use her full range of comedic writing talents. Anna’s whole family seems to be verging on insanity – and are consequently great fun to read about. I was glad to find out that Keyes has written other books about them. An earlier novel, Angels, starring Anna’s sister Maggie, probably the ‘sane’ one of the sisters, will be reviewed later.

In some ways, Anybody Out There doesn’t have a plot. It’s more Anna’s internal resolution of a problem than a story of outside events, although there certainly are plenty of those. But it works really well. There’s so much going on, all the time, even when Anna is just sitting and feeling sad. Loads of critics go on about how books are ‘remarkable achievements’ and I usually get really annoyed when I read them because, for me, there just isn’t anything special about it. So I don’t want to use this term ever because it’s misleading and I’d only ever condone its use if there’s something about the book that’s really really original and even then I wouldn’t want to use it myself in public.

But this time, I’m going to make an exception. Anybody Out There is officially a remarkable achievement.