Forbidden Places (Penny Vincenzi)*****

The first Penny Vincenzi book I read, An Absolute Scandal, was an absolute struggle. There were just too many characters for me to keep up with them all. At least fifteen with their own storylines, all of them having similar experiences with subtle differences. But the writing was excellent, and Blue was one of the most gorgeous men who ever existed in fiction. So I thought Forbidden Places, with its much shorter Dramatis Personnae, was worth a try.

I’m so glad I read it. Once again, the protagonists have similar experiences, but there are really only four of them to keep up with, and one of them is killed off halfway through. This is very sad, of course, but it makes things easie, and it paves the way for something really sweet so I forgive Vincenzi for that. There's so much to enjoy: the writing, the story, the characters, and especially Ben. Blue has officially been surpassed in my affections, something which I never thought would happen. Ben is sweet, emotional, a bit pathetic, very kind, and very thoughtful. I just wanted to tear him out of the book, and marry him immediately. But I don’t think he’d like it if I did that. He’s too committed to everything and everyone I’d be making him leave behind. Come to think of it, my boyfriend might be a bit pissed off too.

Now I’ve just got to read the rest of Vincenzi’s books. If each of them has a character as half as wonderful as Ben and Blue, I know it’s going to be worth reading every word of the 900 pages.

Vincenzi has also created some great female characters. I absolutely adore the tactless Florence. I think she might be slightly autistic, as she is always offending people, apparently by accident. I think she’s actually really nice and although I understood why people were offended, most of what she said wouldn’t offend me. Then there’s Clarissa, who is very sexy, raunchy and naughty and undeniably a bit of a slut, but she’s so brave and funny and affectionate and loving to everyone, it’s very difficult not to love her. Linda is feisty, sexy, and rather witty. She wouldn’t take any crap off anyone, but she has a gentle side. She’s someone who would very easily fit into the world now.

The main character, Grace, is slightly more of a problem. She can be the nicest person in the world. She’s very kind to Ben when he shows up at her house unexpectedly and very distraught. She probably did do rather well to put up with all Florence’s insults when Florence was giving birth to Imogen, but I think a lot of women in labour get a bit like that. Grace is very tolerant of her unreasonable husband Charles and the way his family and friends treat her, and she’s very brave and determined during the challenges of the Second World War.

But she does seem to spend a lot of time hating people. Most of the time, it’s clear why she might be a little bit annoyed, but sometimes she really seems to be going completely over the top. She quite rightly finds the class structure a bit unfair – she marries the upper-class Charles, but is probably only middle class herself and a lot of people look down on her. But Grace has a horrible habit of thinking she’s superior to other people, and most of the time, she’s not. She can be extremely nosy and interfering, and she’s very lucky most of the people in the book end up liking her. Grace’s sweetness makes up for a lot.

But she hits two people. Yes, one of them had behaved badly (if in very difficult circumstances), and the other was being a pompous twat (and I can understand why Grace might think about hitting him), but it just didn’t seem right. If she’d hit the wanker who attacked her, I would have applauded her (even though that’s a bit dodgy too), but she doesn’t. The violence is partly a shock because Grace’s behaviour is usually very gentle, so it seemed very out of character. But it also puts her quite severely into the wrong where she had been in the right, and that was disappointing. There is no need for Grace to be perfect, but I don’t think she needs to be violent.

In some ways, Forbidden Places is a violent book. Most of the men in the book go away to fight in the war, and come back injured. Some of it is quite horrible to read about, but it’s very compellingly written. It’s an inspiring book in some ways because all the characters have to be brave in all kinds of circumstances, yet there is a slight distancing effect because things such as the class structure don’t really belong to our world now. But all the emotions experienced by the characters are very real, and Vincenzi explains the realities of the situation in a thoroughly informative way without taking you away from the story.

The book tells the story of the war, but also the story of people making mistakes but making the best of horrible situations, and working towards being happy. I suppose all books are like that really. But this one hits you hard.

An Absolute Scandal (Penny Vincenzi)**

The only scandal is that this book was published in the first place. Oh, there were some bits I loved - Blue Horton is one of the most gorgeous heroes ever – but NO book needs to be this long. It might have worked as a trilogy – it was good enough for Tolkien, after all – but you don’t need this many storylines. I can usually remember who everyone is without referring to a Dramatis Personnae but I practically needed to write notes in order to keep track of who was doing what with whom.

The Blue/Lucinda/Nigel storyline was lovely – no complaints about that one except I wanted Blue for myself. Their story alone would probably have made a novel of reasonable length, and possibly one with five stars instead of two. Lucinda is an adorable, innocent Sloane Ranger who married Nigel because she couldn’t imagine anything could be nicer than marrying someone so kind, gentle, rich and upper class. Then she meets the sexy, working class (but rich) Blue who probably was just after a quick one to start with, but he falls in love with commendable speed and is absolutely lovely apart from being a little bit immature and not very good at controlling his emotions. Just my type.

Married couple Elizabeth and Simon are both very strong and interesting characters. In case you’re wondering, Elizabeth doesn’t have much of a social life - as she realises at the end of the book - but there is something very powerful and commanding about her. You feel that if she wanted a social life, she’d go out and get one right now. Simon has a sex problem. Everyone else goes on about how charming he is and I suppose they’ve got a point, but the thing that really caught my attention about Simon is what a pervert he is. In a likeable sort of way.

Flora Fielding is a matriarchal, magnificently terrifying grandmother, and I did like the way her less than posh daughter-in-law Debbie was allowed to be intelligent – not that she always makes this obvious. Debbie’s heart is in the right place, but she is the sort of person who becomes very irritating after a while, so perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to put her in an 800 page novel. But her husband Richard is such a bossy, toffy prat, I think I’d be a bit whiny as well if I was married to him. (Hang on, I’m a bit whiny already.)

But there must be a good fifteen ‘main’ characters, and I can’t help thinking it would have been a stronger book with a more manageable number of storylines. It's great the way Elizabeth and Simon’s posh daughter Annabel is expelled from school and then decides to be a hairdresser. Brilliant idea. But we didn’t need to hear all about her relationships too. There’s enough going on already, and her boyfriend Jamie is, frankly, boring – although his bonkers snobby mother Frances is so much like someone I know, she ended up being quite funny. Catherine Morgan is clearly a lovely person, and very useful as a plot device, but having her back story as well just made things even more complicated.

Novels with multiple points of view can be fascinating – just some examples from this blog are The Girls, Getting Rid of Matthew, A Hidden Life and The Chocolate Lovers’ Diet. But there are also several unsuccessful examples as well – like Chart Throb, The Nanny and Ten Days in the Hills. On the whole (although certainly not exclusively), the more ‘protagonists’ there are, the less I’ve enjoyed the book. (Yes, I know you can’t really have more than one protagonist, but ‘polyagonist’ sounds silly.) When the characters are quite similar, it’s hard to tell them apart. When they’re very different, it’s difficult not to have favourites, as well as characters you really don’t like – and it’s inevitable this will lead to the frustrations of having too much of those you dislike, and not enough of those you love.

The main plot is based around Lloyd’s of London. Not the bank, apparently: I never did work out quite who they were which apparently means I’m even less intelligent than Lucinda (which is good news in that I might have a chance with Blue). But I think they’re something to do with insurance, and they have ‘syndicates’ of very rich people who receive a share of the money when Lloyd’s is going well, but owe Lloyd’s money when things are going badly. The Names (the members of the syndicate, I think that means) are supposed to be really rich people who can afford to pay several thousand pounds a year if things go badly, but because of some dirty dealing, a lot of the people in the syndicates really can’t afford it – and indeed, even the rich people are struggling, having to sell at least one of their houses, and even being forced to send their children to state school, which is beyond terrible. The Names therefore band together and discuss what they can do about Lloyd’s – apparently, even if they resign from being a Name, they still have to pay the money for the rest of their lives.

It’s all very complicated and rather boring, but the main problem with this idea is that it never seems to be resolved. Most of the ‘polyagonists’ do have their situations resolved in one way or another, and not always in a good way, but it doesn’t solve the problem for everyone. As far as I can see, this means that the efforts to fight Lloyd’s as a group as failed, which is a shame when so much of the plot has been devoted to this. Perhaps this is the realistic ending, and perhaps one of Vincenzi’s points is that there are more important things in life than money, but it is a bit annoying that something so important, at least in the beginning, is never really brought to any sort of conclusion.

Then there’s all the vomiting. Maybe, as an emetophobe, I’m slightly biased against this, but it does seem to happen to almost everyone in the book far more often than is healthy. The morning sickness is, I suppose, acceptable; the stomach bugs are very useful for keeping wives away from their lovers (although I do wish I’d been spared the details), and the drunkenness is certainly amusing to some people, if not me. But the way everyone appears to do it when they get stressed is totally unacceptable. Not only is this extremely uncomfortable reading for emetophobes, it shows a distinct lack of imagination on the part of the author. There are many ways in which people might react to stress, and considering that all Vincenzi’s characters have such different personalities, they should also have different reactions. There was a bit of crying and shaking, which was nice, but a bit more fainting and tantrums and eating chocolate would have made a real difference.

Vincenzi’s lack of imagination also extended to the way the men looked at the women. All the men seemed to be leg men, which really isn’t that realistic. Just because Lucinda and Debbie and Felicity and God knows who else happen to have great legs, it doesn’t mean their legs have to be pretty much their only good feature. There are more leg men in this book than I’ve met in my whole life. I’ve had all kinds of blokey conversations with my guy mates, but I think the closest we’ve got to discussing which girls have the best legs is when we’ve wondered which girls are sufficiently flexible to perform the entire Kama Sutra (apparently, I am).

And then there’s the fact Simon likes ‘popular’ opera. Fair enough, but this seems to include Beethoven and not Mozart. I would expect operas like The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro to count as popular. And Beethoven only wrote one opera, Fidelio, which is hardly ‘easy listening’: it’s got a role for a Heldentenor. It’s not all that popular either.

Also I don’t think there is a McDonalds opposite High Street Kensington. The Tube station in question isn’t mentioned by name, but I’m pretty sure this is the only Tube station near Kensington Gardens which is one stop from the Central Line and ‘on the way to’ Piccadilly Circus – apart from Bayswater, but that’s only five minutes up the road from Queensway (which is on the Central Line, so you’d have to be really stupid to go to Bayswater in those circumstances). But perhaps there was a McDonalds opposite High Street Kensington in 1990.

There are definitely parts of An Absolute Scandal where you want to keep on reading because there are loads of interesting things going on, and you do want to know how things work out. But after a while, you stop getting that excited because the book is so anticlimactic. Vincenzi will often open a paragraph by saying something very dramatic, but after she’s told you that, there’s almost not much point in reading the rest of that section because you know what’s going to happen. Another annoying habit of hers is ending a chapter at a crucial point, but then not going back to those characters for days, even weeks later, when the crisis is long over.

But Blue is in it so I’ll forgive Vincenzi almost everything.