"All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion". So Tolstoy chose to begin 'Anna Karenin', still frequently referred to as the greatest novel of all time. "Miss Brook had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress". George Eliot's 'Middlemarch', said by no lesser critic than Virginia Woolf to be "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people", a horribly arid recommendation. Both intros are undoubtedly snappy and attention-grabbing, but for the best high voltage opening in England literature you need to take yourself off to a hot summer night in the 1970s for a nightcap at Arabella's and a vintage blast of the early Jilly Cooper: "The moment I set eyes on Jeremy West I knew I had to have him".
The narrator is Octavia, self-confessed bitch and manstealer, who uses a canal boat holiday to try to snare weak-willed poet Jeremy, but is crossed by big-bellied Welsh industrialist Gareth, intent on breaking brittle Octavia's pampered existence into little pieces. He puts her on the road to redemption with a stern spanking in a country house bathroom, not a scenario Jilly's feminist contemporaries can have been wild about, then strips her of her assets. Gone are the luxury Green Park flat and flashy life-style to pay off debts. Octavia struggles through the summer of drought (1976?) as an office dogsbody and Putney waitress, forced into a porn shoot to save disgraced brother Alexander (the hugely dishy 'Xander'). The rains eventually come and so too comes redemption, Octavia moving from cat fights to catharsis, helped on her way by a magnificent supporting cast of dumpy schoolfriends, kindly capitalists and thoroughoing sleazeballs. Why was there never a movie?
Unlike the later, thicker, inferior Cooper novels, there is precious little bonking in 'Octavia', or indeed in most of the other pitch perfect novellas that early Cooper fans cherish: 'Harriet', 'Emily', 'Imogen', 'Prudence' etc... . Our naughty heroine beds the dapper Charlie with some aplomb in the first few pages, although the bedroom gymnastics are dedicated to the preening Jeremy. Diagnosed by her Welsh nemesis as frigid and manipulative, Octavia realises that her valley is best tended by the man from the valleys (apologies for that) and her reward is a big 'O' like a "great, glorious, whooshing washing machine". Well done that girl.
While I have met literary bores who read 'David Copperfield' or (God help them) 'Pride and Prejudice' on an annual basis, I would go for 'Octavia' every time, a frothy (but surprisingly deep) summer read, eminently quotable and wholly unforgettable. According to my calculations, Octavia would be around 61 now. I suspect the Welshman, fast-living and impetuous, may no longer be with us, but couldn't La Cooper give Octavia an equally troubled daughter to learn from Mum?
No comments:
Post a Comment