Thank you to the handful of people who recommended the work of Rosamund Pilcher to me, to assist with my quest to read mostly old(er) books - new work seeming often strange, dashed-off, motivated more by prevailing fashions in the industry rather then just telling a sodding story.
I started about 10 days ago with Coming Home - a family saga set over about ten years, which encompasses the whole of WWII. Just broadly, it is the story of Judith Dunbar, a solidly middle-class, nice girl from Cornwall who falls in with the glamorous Carey-Lewis family.
In a modern story, the Carey-Lewises would turn out to be Satanists, sodomites, Nazis or in some other way very sinister. But because this is a Romance novel of the old school, (as opposed to a rom-com), it is a sweeping, ever-rolling, years-long yarn that simply documents the pretty basic highs and lows of life.
I mean, it’s all still dramatic in a very unlikely way - people die in car crashes and in the war (obviously) and there are huge, unexpected inheritances and children born out of wedlock, people are assumed dead but then are actually alive!! but it’s all so gentle. There is no central, hideous drama, no secret family under the stairs, nobody strangles anyone else’s dog. No-one is a dangerous narcissist.
And it’s very mild drama set against the most lush backdrops you can imagine: stormy Cornish nights, enormous aristocratic houses, beautiful London Mews bolt-holes, the lush tropics, adorable boarding schools (where no-one is tormented or abused). Characters are constantly getting very cold and then warming up next to fires, or getting incredibly hot and sweaty and then diving into the sea.
And it is so long. My god. I read for days and days and only occasionally see the percentage count (I read on a Kindle) tick up by 1.
I did think that Jilly Cooper must have read a lot of Rosamund Pilcher but now I see that they were writing sort of at the same time. Pilcher’s breakthrough novel was The Shell Seekers in 1987 and Coming Home was written in 1995. Riders was written in 1985, so in fact they are direct literary contemporaries. There are an awful lot of similarities: unfeasibly nice and considerate men, reams and reams of stuff about flowers: foaming hawthorne hedges, nodding daffodils, creamy chrysanthemums etc, and always one girl who is completely hopeless, massively over-emotional and constantly adopting stray dogs etc.
At some points the writing is hilariously silly and the plot absurd, but there is so much about modern life that I find so hideous, stressful and bad it’s really nice to just vanish into a book where there are doilies everywhere and people calling the loo “the lav”.
I did get a bit fed up with trawling through all the bloody letters Pilcher includes as a way of moving the plot onwards. Although, I suppose, in 1943 that’s how people communicated - it would be as unthinkable to have a novel about people without letters as it would be to have a novel set now about people with no texts or emails.
Anyway, if you are looking for something extremely comforting, nostalgic, entirely gentle and unscary to get you through Autumn: Rosamunde Pilcher is the woman for you.
At the other end of the scale, if you want something to get you hiding behind the cushions: Bad Sisters on Apple TV. There are no limits to my respect for Sharon Horgan. She has been banging out, well, bangers for years. Pulling, Catastrophe, Motherland, Military Wives. In Divorce she even went toe-to-toe with Sarah Jessica Parker, which I hear is no mean feat. It’s just very impressive to have so many good ideas, to have the guts to get them all through, made and done with confidence, despite the bone-chilling threat of very modern newcomers such as Phoebe Waller Bridge, Michaela Coel etc.
Bad Sisters is about five sisters who hate their brother in law and what they intend to do about it. Of course, they have to make the brother in law really awful for this to fly and Horgan does duly go to town on him. He is a bad person but in a very believable way. And it makes everything just incredibly tense. It is a dazzling show, with some amazing performances and brilliant and original characters but it is just too good, in a way. Too tense, there is too much at stake! I couldn’t get past episode 3. I think it might have to be Rosamunde Pilcher and Antiques Roadshow for me now, forever.
I am also indebted to the reader who suggested drink TRIP (the peach and ginger one) as a way to ward off the 6pm GIVE ME A DRINK OR I WILL KILL YOU vibes. It’s absolutely delicious and more or less does the trick.
And you? Have you been able to get past episode 3 of Bad Sisters? If yes, I salute you.
Thanks Esther for the writer recommendation. I read The Shell Seekers many moons ago. Will download ‘Coming Home’ as it’s probably just what I want read .
Just one more episode left for me and it’s definitely worth sticking with. I found the first few really intense but gripped now.