Pull "Catherine Cookson" off the Internet and you'll discover that even her biographical entry there is written in Cooksonspeak. "She was not very popular as a child and was always being taunted by the other children about her mother and upbringing," it says. "In 1929 she moved to Sussex where she worked in a laundry and craved respect and security. With the money she saved from this job she bought a big house and took in gentlemen lodgers. Schoolmaster Thomas Cookson was one of them, she fell in love with him and they married. Marriage did not bring her happiness, though . . . " And so on.
These simplicities look strange enough on a computer screen. But they're at the centre of her success. Change a detail here and there and her life might be the plot of any of her more than ninety novels. Ninety, that is, published novels: she has more to hand which have not yet been released. Her biography tells us that her story "fascinates people, who visit south Tyneside to see and experience the things she did. They can walk the streets and read plaques detailing places and people that were significant in her life or her novels. Coach tours also take visitors around sites with significance to her life . . . "
Fact and fiction are irretrievably confused in Cooksonland. Both are subsumed into a dimension full of cruel rich men and innocent poor girls and illegitimate children and rags-to-riches careers and melodramatic loves and hates which both Catherine Cookson and her fans have decided is "the past". "Her New Historical Novel" it says, brazenly, on the title page of The Branded Man, her latest mega-seller (Corgi, £5.99 in UK). To the mass female audience, school Shakespeare, perhaps, and Catherine Cookson's novelettes, certainly, are what is meant by history. And when I say "mass" I mean mass: the publishers Corgi, alone, have sold more than 50 million Cooksons.
The paradox is that Cookson's period novels are as palatable as a puree because there is absolutely no period feel to them, and the dialogue spoken in them is (for want of a better word) contemporary-stilted. The past simply provides a series of props on which the unhappiness-becomes-happiness plot of The Branded Man and its many clones are constructed.
Marie Anne - described in one of the author's frequent absent-minded moments as having "elfin skin" - is the tempestuous but strangely beautiful daughter of a wicked and snobbish mother (her father is merely "weak"). She is "an imp at heart . . . that's all she is, an impish young girl".
The imp is banished to London from her country manor, ostensibly to study music. She and the music teacher kiss one hot day and he forces himself further. "Part of it had been beautiful but another part had been ugly," she concludes about the experience. Nine weeks and two missed periods later, when she is getting sick every morning, the penny drops. "Yes, yes. That was it. The beautiful and the ugly experience. That was it."
She didn't really realise it was sex she was having, since in principle she hates sex because she once caught sight of her (wicked, snobbish) sister engaged in some. "Oh Lord, Lord! She couldn't bear it, she couldn't . . . He . . . he mustn't do that! It was bad! bad . . . Don't be silly! Don't be silly!" (thus Marie Anne's stream of consciousness while watching the sister).
Anyway, she hides her shame in an East End slum, protected by a lovable Irish servant called Sarah Foggerty. While Sarah serves drinks in a tavern, Marie Anne happens to plunge into "Beethoven's Apassionata" on the tavern piano. "It's a pianist you are, Miss, a pianist," the men in the tavern say, leading Marie Anne to exclaim to Sarah: "A magic day, don't you think Sarah? A magic day."
The astute reader will have noticed by now that a comfortable repetitiveness is a key element in Catherine Cookson's style. Much later, when Marie Anne is home, has had the baby, and is progressing matters with Don, the branded man of the title (who in the manner of melodrama the world over is a master of coincidence, having picked her up when she fainted after seeing the sister and the sex, bumped into her in the East End and brought her back to her family, and been there to save her life when she was carried beaten-up by her - wicked, snobbish - brother into Don's cottage, there to have her baby), her brother tries to kill her.
On page 453 Don explains to Sarah what had happened: "I left Marie Anne on the beach while I went up to the cottage to make the lunch. The first thing I heard was her screaming . . ." and so on. On page 455 he explains to her (nice, so unsnobby that he marries a Catholic) brother: "I left Marie Anne lying on the beach while I went to make some lunch. I heard her scream . . ." And so on.
Saying everything twice is one way of getting 90odd novels written. It must be reassuring to readers who may never have had any training in the retention of a narrative. But it can drive the more conscious reader mad.
The suffering in this novel is, characteristically, pregnancy for females and poverty for males, and it is mostly caused by the wicked mother and her snobbery. And she only from the shopkeeping classes herself! Her creator allows her to die in agony, whereas her "weak" husband ends up loved by everybody and happily married again.
Otherwise, the personnel of the novel are in general saintly. Marie Anne is saintly, the branded man is saintly, and Sarah the loveable Irish servant is the most saintly of all, since she conceals her love for the branded man so that he and Marie Anne can come together. Which they can only do, however, when a saintly doctor tackles the hideous birth-mark disfiguring Don and getting him the nickname of "the branded man" by having made for him "a mould of finest papiermache, tinted to appear like flesh, Don's flesh, and kept in place by a cap-like crown of doeskin" (the latter made from "a pair of ladies' long evening gloves").
Attention to practical detail is one of Catherine Cookson's strong points. So is a kind of plodding even-handedness which sorts out every little detail of the fate of everybody in the book, even people only mentioned, and never met. And in The Branded Man she is also unexpectedly interested in one big theme, which is the relations between Protestants and Catholics in England around 1900. She is Henry James compared to Barbara Cartland, say. All the same, she is a very bad writer, with little gift for characterisation or dialogue or description.
Still, 50 million readers are witnesses that can't be ignored. Evidently, something of Catherine Cookson's own experience of survival against the odds still lives in her, since she rehearses it in novel after novel. And equally evidently, millions of women feel that's the story they can most comfort themselves with - that the worst unhappiness can turn to happiness, that the most miserable fate can be survived, and that there is a good and exciting man there to love even the most forgotten woman.
This message, set in the contemporary world, would be so obviously untrue as to be unacceptable. But put it back, by unspoken agreement, into a world of carriages and crinolines and it can be repeated like a mantra, over and over. Laughable romantic novelettes may be, but the yearnings behind them are not.
Nuala O'Faolain is an Irish Times columnist and the author of Are You Somebody?
Fifty million readers can't be ingored: Catherine Cookson