One of the (several) joys of a reading group is that you are introduced to books that you wouldn’t otherwise have read. Another is that even books you don’t particularly care for can generate stimulating and enjoyable discussion, and for that reason alone it may be worth persisting with a book which you might otherwise have abandoned at an early stage. It’s always interesting to hear why a book was chosen and you can come away with a better understanding and appreciation of a writer or a genre you would previously have neglected.
This book by a popular author examines the lives of two very privileged women and exposes the undercurrents of problems in their lives and their immediate families, all of whom are on the face of it equally fortunate and successful. It explores major themes including grief and loss, infidelity, illness, parental expectations and dementia.
The main characters are two rather smug middle-class Oxford educated women in their sixties, friends from university days. One of them has been recently widowed and the other is about to have her comfortable life upended by illness and infidelity.
There’s a liberated dyslexic daughter who is a disappointment to her academic mother and who secretly longs for motherhood and marriage, a devilishly attractive Lothario, a dependable gay man, a closet lesbian and a senile old lady. These could be seen as an attempt to balance the concerns of different generations but some of us felt the result was a lack of depth and the characters became caricatures.
A happy ending can be redemptive or trite. With so many themes in this novel the happy ending to one major event might have been tempered by a more troubling outcome elsewhere. But here every negative seems, however implausibly, to have a silver lining.
This was a quick, easy read although not everyone liked the writing style, and this in itself may have led some to set the book aside had it not been a book group choice.
Although it wouldn’t be true to say we found new things to like, in our discussion we enjoyed talking about the writing style, the characters, those stereotypes and those happy endings, so the scores we gave to discussion were in most cases higher than we gave to whether we were likely to recommend it to a friend.
Averaged, the scores for discussion were 2/5 and for recommendation to a friend 1/5.
Review by Ann Whitfield