Like a steaming bowl of chicken soup or a warm, fluffy blanket, a novel by Georgette Heyer is a comfort. Her heroines are always bright and dazzling and her waggish heroes firm but good-hearted. Heyer’s knack of balancing melodrama and wit keeps some of the most ludicrous plots fresh and engaging, and April Lady’s premise is utterly absurd.
Earl Giles Cardross has recently married his considerably younger Lady Nell, choosing her from society’s debutantes by falling in love with her at sight. Their marriage is one of necessity to Nell’s noble but financially-stricken family and, unfortunately for Nell, her ninny-headed mother impresses this upon her. Nell, who is as struck with Giles as he is with her, is overly demure and distant as a new bride because she does not wish to be bothersome as a “convenient wife”. Naturally, she throws her energy into society, balls and the ton, but by settling the debts of her gambling brother, she runs up her own on gowns and bonnets. Nell reluctantly tells Giles that she has overspent her quarterly allowance and he promptly clears her accounts but is left with the impression that Nell has married him for his riches. When Nell discovers a forgotten bill she is ashamed and hides it from Giles, fearing to lose his affection and further excite his perception of her as a gold-digger. She enlists her black-sheep brother to raise the funds instead of risking Giles’ wrath by revealing her plight.
A multiplicity of mix-ups and preposterous schemes for procuring the “blunt” follow and although the reader knows Nell and Giles will be reconciled eventually, the journey to that point is erratic and unpredictable.
April Lady sprints along, juggling and incorporating subplots to create a finely-polished and enthralling tale. Heyer’s blend of historical romance and immaculately-timed comedy is like a Jane Austen and PG Wodehouse cocktail—charming and pithy.
Part of the success of April Lady is Heyer’s well-drawn characters. In other hands, Nell would be insipid and frustrating for not clearing up the misunderstanding with her husband immediately. Instead, she enchants with the cool management of her unruly brother, Dysart, and idealist sister-in-law, Letty, and has a ready-wit to counter the quibbles of her fashionable and fastidious cousin, Felix. Giles also is well-fleshed out as the charismatic and droll, much-put upon earl and his fast-paced dialogue keeps the pages turning.
April Lady’s comedy of manners is best shown, however, through Dysart, the compulsive gambler and loveable scamp whose aid to Nell includes holding her carriage up in a highway robbery. His inebriated antics are hilarious, especially at the climax of the book, and the quips of this good-natured daredevil are expertly rendered in the colloquialisms of Regency England.
Heyer wrote forty historical romances in meticulously-researched detail. Her novels, which were published from the 1930s to 1950s, may not suit all readers because her wild heroines are always and eventually tamed by their leading men. However, if some light-hearted, feel-good escapism is what you need, this book is for you.
Danny Skinner works for the Edinburgh council as a successful health inspector which he slots around his drug and alcohol binges. He is confident, stylish and has a way with the lassies but his love of a pint is estranging him from his ex-punk mother, endangering his career and destroying his relationship with his beautiful fiancée.
Meanwhile, he’s searching for the identity of his father, using information from a local, minor-celebrity chef’s latest publication, Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, which is linked to his mother’s waitressing days at the time of his conception.
When the conscientious Brian Kibby comes to work at the council, Skinner forms an intense and irrational hatred towards the clean-living and shy teetotaller. Kibby is socially awkward and has a passion for model trains, Star Trek conventions and non-violent video games; he epitomises the nerdiness that Skinner doesn’t have and is an unlikely nemesis. But as Skinner’s alcoholism escalates—he loses his fiancée and nearly his job—and the two compete for a promotion, Skinner’s abhorrence of Kibby triggers a supernatural curse. The hex ensures that Kibby takes on all the effects of Skinner’s hard living: hangovers, violent injuries from soccer hooliganism, repercussions of a brutal rape, obesity and eventually the need for a liver transplant. Skinner relishes this lack of consequence and delights in inflicting as much physical and mental pain on the luckless Kibby.
Welsh has littered this book with confusing first-person perspectives where anyone and everyone—a nurse, a cashier or a lady getting her hair cut—will get a few pointless paragraphs then slip into obscurity. Amongst this clutter of periphery characters’ viewpoints, the plot occasionally surfaces but is laboured and predictable. The big reveal of Skinner’s father is obvious from very early on and Welsh leaves nothing to his reader’s imagination—Welsh is explicit about what will happen at the time of the hex but references Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray just in case.
The result is a tedious read full of some very contrived elements: Skinner, despite his full-time hedonism, is purported to be a thinker because his shelves are full of poetry; his behaviour is spuriously equated with that of Bush and Blair in a lame political spin; and his American love interest is called Dorothy Cominksy and has a “dot.com business” (shorten Dorothy’s name for the wit).
Unusually, Welsh’s signature Scottish-phonetic dialect is toned down and set against a more elegant third-person narrative but the two styles clash and grate, adding to the reader’s disorientation. Unfortunately, Welsh’s new-found style is damaged by clichés (“twisted like a knife”), tautology (“nodded affirmatively”), predictable adverbs (“meticulously prepared”) and bizarre turns of phrase (“a fart slipped out of him, as poignantly weeping as a lover’s last farewell”). This is aside from occasionally misplaced words that render passages ridiculous—characters don’t leave, they make “a defeated egress”.
Mr Welsh’s editorial team has done him a disservice—the book should have had a sound structural edit and a thorough copyedit prior to its publication. Then again, bad writing is bad writing.
