HERE we go again. Is it just me, or is contemporary popular fiction crammed to the covers with successful single career women of a certain age who wear all the right clothes, know all the right people and lead sickeningly satisfying social lives?
Take Charmian Sinclair, for instance. Charmian is the heroine of Elizabeth Palmer's Flowering Judas. She is introduced thus "Charmian believed in variety, and that to experience as much as one could in every conceivable way was the sole point of earthly existence. It was with this aim in mind that she had a series of London lovers, one for every day of the week except Friday when she went off to the country to spend the weekend with Giles Hayward."
Charmian handles this jaw dropping arrangement with the same detached efficiency she applies to her clothes and hairstyle. As its workings are revealed over a series of chapters, several weeks in the time scale of the novel, you find yourself wondering sneakily whether it can actually be done. I bet, you find yourself saying as she locks up her trendy little office for the evening Charmian, naturally, has her own successful PR business she's going to pig out on the sofa tonight eating Coco Pops and watching EastEnders.
But Charmian, needless to say, never pigs out ever. On Monday nights she sees Dominic Goddard, PR high flyer, keen on theatre and ballet, happily married. Tuesdays it's Gervaise Hanson, lawyer, into modern art, languid and knowledgeable, happily married. Wednesdays it's Nigel Guest, advertising man in an Armani suit, happily married. Thursdays are reserved for a Labour MP called Gerald Stanhope happily married, of course and then it's Friday and off to the country to Giles, who isn't married at all, happily or otherwise, as above.
Obviously there are questions to be asked about Charmian's way of life. When, for example, does she iron the crisp blouses she wears with her sharp suits? How does she maintain that English rose complexion if she leaps into bed each night with a different man, never pausing to think of essential eye cream or reconstituting neck gel? And how come she doesn't keep vampire like working hours like most PR people? I'd like to know all these things, and furthermore, as a moderately successful single woman of a certain age for whom a bowl of cereal in front of the telly frequently marks the highlight of the social week, I'd like to know where to sign up.
Well, maybe not. Back at the plot, disaster strikes Charmian's charmed existence when her brother in law is fired from his high flying job in advertising. All kinds of vengeful yuppie shenanigans ensue takeover bids, head a hunting, with mobile phones on overdrive. Elizabeth Palmer, who apparently spends half her time in the London milieux she so accurately recreates and half in Ireland, orchestrates her comedy of manners with appealing ease her characters, particularly Charmian's eccentric parents, are a cut above the average to be found in romantic fiction and if Charmian does find herself happily hitched to the man of her dreams at the end of it all, well, you can't blame her, especially as she met him at the wonderful Poussin exhibition at the Royal Academy. Funny thing. I spent numerous happy hours pottering around that exhibition, and didn't meet anything more exciting than a band of utterly silent Japanese tourists. Ah well.
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