Posts Tagged ‘Romantic Novel of the Year’

Respected journalist and frustrated romantic. Danuta Kean, had a toot about modern romantic novels in Tuesday’s Daily Mail, following the recent Romantic Novel of the Year Award.  Her particular beef is what we novelists have done to our heroes.  And there’s a poll at the Daily Mail’s website which says that, so far, 71% of people who bother to vote agree with her.  I’m still pondering that one and will possibly come back to it.

But what grabbed me was her reference to her own year as a judge, when we asked a group of men to read two or more of the short listed novels and come along and discuss them.  The jamboree under reference took place in my house and I was catering, so most of my attention in the early stages was focused on serving industrial sized shepherds pie and extracting corks.  My notes are therefore not comprehensive – but I did scribble down stuff that struck me at the time, and jolly interesting it is, if a bit grub-and-booze-stained. 

There were, I think, 9 men at supper.  They had each read at least two;  none of them had read all.  They ranged from 25 – 65, all of them read novels for fun but none of them was in the writing business.  The shortlisted books were:

• A Good Voyage by Katharine Davies (Chatto and Windus) 
• Love and Devotion by Erica James (Orion)
• Small Island by Andrea Levy (Headline)
• The Hornbeam Tree by Susan Lewis (Heinemann-Random House)
• The Tenko Club by Elizabeth Noble (Hodder)
• Ghost Heart by Cecilia Samartin (Bantam World     

From my notes, it is clear that overwhelmingly three things hit me at the time – 1) the guys’ trepidation at reading romantic fiction at all;  2) a feeling that they were spying while doing so;  and 3) what, if anything, they thought romantic.

1)      Trepidation is basically the Bertie Wooster Syndrome.  You may recall that Wooster, endeavouring to retrieve a letter from Gussie Fink-Nottle giving Madeleine Bassett the heave ho,  is surprised mid-burglary by Madeleine herself.  Unfortunately, he is clutching her photograph at the time.  Much moved, she tells him the story of Rose M Banks’s romantic best selling opus Mervyn Keene, Clubman, of whose hero the unfortunate Bertram reminds her.  She does so in a low voice, the reader will remember, ‘with a goodish amount of throb in it’.  What our guys feared, as they squared up to novels that women thought romantic, is encapsulated in the Wooster reaction.  

Well, it was difficult, of course, to know quite what comment to make.  I said ‘Oh, ah!’ but I felt at the time that it could have been improved on.  The fact is, I was feeling a bit stunned.  I had always known in a sort of vague, general way that Mrs Bingo wrote the world’s worst tripe – Bingo generally changes the subject nervously if anyone mentions the little woman’s output – but I had never supposed her capable of bilge like this.‘  Ah, nobody says it better than PG Wodehouse. 

2)     Spying - ‘I feel like a peeping Tom,’  one guy said at the time.   Others, generally the younger end, agreed.  Romantic novels, they felt, were girls’ locker room stuff and they didn’t really want to see in!   Older men tended to be more robust about the revelation of What Women Talk About, but professed themselves puzzled at the results.  ‘It all goes round and round but nobody does anything,’  said one.  ‘If the characters are not going to change something, why don’t they just stop picking at it and shut up?’  Small Island and Ghost Heart were largely but not entirely exempt from this, but A Good Voyage, a modern re-telling of Twelfth Night, was included.

3)    Romantic for Men?  All of our  book group said they had been moved by one or more romantic novels at some point, even if not these.  I couldn’t find one who was a fan of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights and the Jane Austen afficionados weren’t in it for the romance.  But the Lady of the Camellias had a couple of supporters.  The only contemporary novel that anyone mentioned was Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music, which one of the group thought was true heart-wringing stuff and a bloody good book into the bargain.  (I must say, I agree.)

One other oddity was that they were all easily distracted from character and plot into talking about the socio-political issues of  Small Island and Ghost Heart.  The former benefitted, since nobody thought racism was a good thing.  The latter, in some ways an elegy for pre-Castro Cuba, suffered from those who already had a political position, which was generally that Castro was better than his predecessor.  None of them enjoyed – as I did, profoundly – its utter longing for a Paradise lost.  

I see that at the time I concluded that our group  of male readers weren’t hostile to romantic fiction but :

• they want less talk and more do
• emotional hypchondria a no no
• exclusively domestic and personal stories makes them feel claustrophobic
• want something to be achieved, a mystery solved, or a point to be proved

But, I must say, not one of them, unlike Danuta, commented on the heroes’ sex appeal or lack of it.

Could it be that men and women are different?

 My fifth account of a book on the Romantic Novel of the Year long list, though actually this is one I had already read before the list was published.

THE SUMMER HOUSE by Mary Nichols spans World Wars 1 and 2, metropolis and village, big house and slum terrace.   It was a time of enormous change, in social conventions, moral values, class structures and education and one of the many delights of this book is the author’s unobtrusive but faultless sense of place and time.  

Essentially, this is the story of tragedy in three women’s lives – and how they survive and grow afterwards.  The constraints of the times affect the practical outcomes.  But the feelings, described here with a restraint that makes them all the more painful,  are universal.  During the Great War young Lady Helen marries a man her family feels at home with and then, finding him a stranger, falls in love with someone else.  Her family cannot permit her to keep a child that is not her husband’s, so she is hustled into something close to prison until the birth and then the child is taken away.  The moral disdain of those employed to help her through the birth is chilling but the withdrawal of affection from her family is worse and rings heartbreakingly true.   Eventually, widowed and orphaned by the War, Helen sets out to find her daughter.  But the lies she has been told, and holes in the records make it  very difficult – and when she does, she has to confront a whole human dilemma.

Anne  sacrifices everything, including the emotional honesty of her marriage and her own self-aproval, to have a child.  And Laura,  the precious and beloved daughter,  discovers when Anne dies that she has been lied to throughout her life.  The relationship of the three women is spiky and difficult and utterly believable.  They may be jealous, they are certainly fearful, and they have deep wounds to deal with, but they all, in their own way, try to be reasonable, even to those who can hurt them.  Laura, caught up in the consequences of old secrets, does cry out at one point, ‘It’s like a contagion, spreading and spreading.  I don’t feel like being fair.  No one’s been fair to me.’   But these women are practical and honest and, in the end, Laura is fair, in spite of intense provocation.  It is nothing short of heroic.

The most important love affair – well, this is long-listed for the Romantic Novel of the Year, after all – is mainly told from the hero’s point of view, and is a real heart-turner.  He is one of the good guys, quiet and responsible and outshone by flashier chaps – at least two of them in this book.  And then the awful thing happens and he starts to think of himself as a monster.  

A rich, understated book of many dimensions -  including a whole East Anglian village coming to terms with the wartime arrival of American troops.  It is  a five handkerchief weepie along the way with, ultimately a  deeply satisfying resolution, in which steadfastness is rewarded and endurance justified.   A feast

 DECLARATION OF INTEREST   Mary Nichols is an author I am proud to call a mate.  She is also a Treasure of the Romantic Novelists’ Association.  In 2009 she had three books, all in different genres, published within six weeks of each other and celebrated her diamond wedding anniversary.  She got a card from the Queen – and a blog post from us.

This is my fourth book from the Romantic Novel of the Year longlist:  BEACHCOMBING  by Maggie Dana. 

I’ve actually been reading steadily through the long list and not blogging at all in the busy few weeks since Christmas.  (Okay, I admit it, that’s my priorities for you.)   As a result, I’m backed up with notes on several other long-listers.  Will put them up in short order, I promise.

BEACHCOMBING is another first novel.  This time it’s from the MacMillan New Writing stable which, along with Authonomy and the Romantic Novelists’  own New Writing Scheme, are seen as good routes to publication .

Jill Hunter had a boyfriend when she was a teenager, the sort of boyfriend that teenagers dream about and almost nobody finds – handsome, kind, considerate, divinely competent, and not ashamed to hold hands.  They have a moment of passion and then he disappears.  Well, his father is disgraced and the family moves away, but it’s hardly his fault and he never gets in touch.  It niggles.  Even after moving continents, marriage, divorce, two sons and a whole load of life experiences, a bit of Jill still has this question mark – and this template of perfect love.

Flashbacks are an integral part of this book and one of it strengths is that you see how the teenager is still part of the mature woman – and vice versa.  The plot moves from Jill’s beach home (and hanging-on-by-the-fingernails career) in small town Connecticut to London and Cornwall, where friends from the teenage past resurface.   Pretty soon the reader is thinking:  there’s more than one mystery here, but Jill has only noticed the missing boyfriend.  Most satisfyingly, you have to wait but you get the answer to that other mystery too, along with the emotional truth which as a teenager she did not question.     

As for the missing BF – he resurfaces too.  He still has wonderfully kind green eyes.  Jill does what  probably 99% of us would, given the chance.    

This book is very good about female friendship, about kindness, about the shore and the store and the pressures of only-just-earning-a-living.  (The scene where Jill goes head to head with a loathesome client had me punching the air in pure wish fulfilment.  Yay!)  Jill is a practical, up-beat funny woman and you are delighted to spend time with her first person narrative.  She can dream, she can be sad, but basically, she’s a problem solver with a heart, who just happens to be what my grandmother would have called A Bad Picker.

But do not worry, Bad Picker though she is, a true hero is there.  You recognise him because he does things for her that will warm the heart of every woman, well every woman I know, anyway.  Read the book and find out. 

DECLARATION  OF INTEREST    I’d never heard of Maggie Dana until I picked up this book.  So this author is a complete stranger to me, too.

My second book off the Romantic Novel of the Year long list is PASSION by Louise Bagshawe.

Her publishers call it James Bond for girls and, on first finishing it, my question was ‘Why for girls?’   Because the author is a woman?  

This has all the ingredients of a classic action adventure:  devious men with dubious backgrounds;  relentless, professional killers;  power play at the highest levels;  conspicuous consumption; high octane sex; a nerve-wracking chase; mulitple disguises; and a super sexy, highly trained former secret agent hero who is the best of the best.  Doesn’t sound particularly girly, does it?

What it doesn’t have, I suppose, is the Fleming fascination with weaponry and exclusive brands,  nor the snobbery.  The gorgeous hero was a Barnardo’s boy – now a  billionaire banker, he goes to New York Private Views, but not to casinos or gentlemen’s clubs in St James’s.   And the heroine, though plain, ill-dressed and border-line depressed, is a respected academic . . . 

Ah, that’s why this is one for the girls.  The heroine has a brain.

It starts in Oxford with a teenage romance between don’s daughter and boy from the wrong side of the tracks.  It ends badly, scarring both.  But twenty years later, Will has not forgotten Melissa and the memory causes him to make connections between unexplained deaths . . . and to see, long before anyone else does, that his old flame is probably the next target.  He sets out to save her … and the hunt is on.

The action – and by golly there is plenty of it, edge of the seat stuff – moves from Oxford to London, New York to Boston, rural France and Rome , with stops off in Berlin, Caracas and the Gulf to tune into the Opposition.   The hero is rich - but the Opposition is richer.  The hero is shrewd and skilful with good friends still in the spying business who will help him out.  But the Opposition has limitless resources and access to the intelligence of several governments.  No doubt who the underdogs are and, indeed, Will and  Melissa end on their own with nothing to rely on but their courage, intelligence and resourcefulness.  (Their planning, by the way, separately and together, is one of the most rewarding bits of this book.)

A page turner.

DECLARATION OF INTEREST   Nope, don’t know Louise Bagshawe either.

I’m turning the year with a beastly lurgy. (Coughing so hard, my ribs hurt.) So I thought I would give myself afternoons in front of the fire with a comfort read. Fortunately the long list for the UK’s Romantic Novel of the Year is just out.

First off Waterstone’s shelf was LOST DOGS AND LONELY HEARTS by Lucy Dillon.

Lucy Dillon seems to have beaten the Curse of the Second Novel with this gentle, touching story of human rehabilitation by abandoned dogs. Rachel, glamorous PR person and ex-mistress-of-the-boss, is dumped and fired in one go and fetches up in a small Worcestershire town where her aunt has left her a dog sanctuary. Stunned and sad – and believe me, this writer is very good indeed at sadness and what it does to  people and dogs - Rachel pretty much falls into taking over. The first task is to make the kennels pay – which means finding human partners for the canine boat people under her roof, which in turn takes her out into the life of the town, making plans and crossing swords with the cryptic local vet. The second is to unravel the mystery left by her enigmatic aunt.

The characters are skilfully drawn, mostly well intentioned but often mistaken or, quite simply, inarticulate at the wrong time. The silence that grows between an infertile couple is almost too painful to bear at one point. You can see how it happens but equally, you can’t see how they will get out of it. (It takes a Basset-hound-provoked crisis.)

The dogs are as three dimensional as the human characters and just as engaging. The Basset does tend to take over (when don’t they?) but there is an incontinent Labrador pup and a managing sheep dog, which I also treasure. And recognise.

This is a book about reconciliation and kindness and letting go of bad stuff and it has a wonderfully believable and yet romantic ending.

Fab book. Big fat happy sigh

DECLARATION OF INTEREST Since I know several authors on the long list and at least two are seriously good mates, I thought it would be sound practice to state where I’m coming from, after every book I write about. Lucy Dillon is a stranger to me – unless I’ve met her at conferences and things under her real name of Ermyntrude Gutbucket, of course – and I haven’t read her first book. Yet.