Nicole Milller, the heroine of Julie Burchill's latest novel, is the kind of figure dreamed up by women's magazines. A fashion illustrator living in a converted loft space in London's docklands, she spends her free time drinking champagne, doing Grade A drugs with her girlfriends and chatting to her Asian therapist, Usha. She wears dresses by Ghost, has friends called Zoe, Emma and Lucy and does "a little light Buddhist chanting" to relieve stress.
Of course, there has to be a fly in the ointment, and, in age-old tradition, that fly is a man - Matt Miller, jet-setting fashion photographer and teen-idol lookalike. The point of difference between Burchill's narrative and so many of its romantic slush predecessors is that Nicole has already scooped her man; she and Matt tied the knot five years ago. The only problem is that their current state is not so much wedded bliss as hit and miss; Nicole is still attracted to Matt but unfortunately Matt spends most of his time taking pictures of half-naked beauties in Mauritius and calling it work.
After a phone call from her mother (a.k.a. "That Voice"), there is another fly to add to the ointment: Nicole's beloved grandmother, Liza Sharp, the woman who introduced her to the arts of shoplifting and skiving off school as a child, is about to be put into a home for the elderly. Fuelled by the nostalgic effects of a rather bad hangover, Nicole promptly takes Liza to live with her in loftland, false teeth, Tizer and all, in an attempt to win back the sense of security she felt as a child.
However, Nicole soon realises that what was shocking and outrageous in her grandmother as a child (Guinness burps, foul language and sausage suppers) are merely tiresome when you're thirtysomething and trying to keep a marriage together. Inevitably, Matt is not quite so enchanted with the idea of sharing the marital futon, while Liza shows her gratitude by lavishing her love on a thoroughly nasty 12-year-old from Tower Hamlets. Unfortunately, that is just about as far as the plot of Married Alive goes. There are a few funny moments but nothing more ever actually happens, so when Burchill feels the need to finish things off after 190-odd pages, the ends are tied up like a badly wrapped parcel, without flourish or effect.
Of course, looking for plot complexity is perhaps to miss the whole point of a novel by Julie Burchill, as the story is really just something on which to hang a furious onslaught of Burchillisms. Not so much a novel as one long one-liner ("I've never believed that lame line about there being a thin line between love and hate - obviously there's not, or we'd all go about on the verge of falling in love with the people we're married to.") whether you enjoy Married Alive will probably depend on whether you are a fan of Burchill's journalism, as many of the same concerns surface in both.
It is a little disappointing, therefore, that Burchill doesn't take the opportunity presented by the novel format to explore more fully two of her habitual hobby-horses - marriage and class difference. Although the breakdown of Nicole's marriage gives her endless scope for witty observations, it never really comes off the page as a real relationship.
With the issue of class difference, Burchill lets herself down even further. There is an interesting conflict set up between Nicole's hatred of her mother's aspirations and Nicole's own leap from working-class roots to Blair babe, but Burchill seems distinctly uninterested in pursuing the idea further. Rather she contradicts herself at every turn but doesn't quite seem to realise it - certainly the misplaced snobbism of her protagonist is not subjected to the same derision as nearly everything else. There is a definite sense that while Married Alive is practically a didactic text, so full is it of Burchill's bugbears, these are meant as an end in themselves. Plot, thematic development and characterisation must inevitably play second fiddle.
