In November I asked for suggestions for something Christmassy to have as the December Book Club choice. A couple of people suggested Medieval Christmas by local writer Sophie Jackson published last year by Alan Sutton which investigates the roots of the Christmas feast and which offers help on how to recreate elements of this medieval feast with ideas on decorations, instructions for playing medieval games and recipes for seasonal dishes. A lovely book but not one which fits easily into the Book Clubs theme of exploring creative writing linked to East Anglia. Someone else suggested MR James’ ghost stories but I think that’s more for Halloween. Nobody came up with a Christmas Carol type East Anglian book which is what I was hoping for. So when a friend said that she had bought her husband some recently published fiction by a Norfolk writer as a Christmas present I went for that.
So the Book Club Choice for December is A Perfect Life by Raffaella Barker. The book’s marketing blurb is quite explicit about what the book is all about - ‘What do you do when you should be happy, but you're not? Who do you blame when you realise you don't love your husband any more? What can you change when you see your family is falling apart? What if you had the perfect life... and it turned out to be anything but? This work looks at answers for these questions.’ In the book, which is also quite explicit in places, Angel, is the unhappy wife and she wonders why ‘ she has she decided to ask so many people to lunch on the day of (her husband) Nick's return from a week away in New York? She knows the answer: it is simple, it is quicker to form than the question. She lives with the answer all the time - it never changes, she cannot bear to be alone with him.’
I wonder if my friend is trying to tell her husband something! Maybe not the best choice for Christmas but it is a good read and Jarrolds’ Book Department in Norwich has this hardback book available for £9.99. Raffaella Barker has been represented in the book club column before as author of the chidren’s book Phosphorescence. She grew up in Norfolk at Itteringham, with her parents, the poet George Barker and Elspeth, a novelist. Her 1995 novel Come and Tell Me Some Lies an account of a ‘bohemian childhood and family - a rendering of a childhood amid a wild and adventurous family’ was inspired by her own childhood.
Why so long for intro to be put up?
Oh no not another rural tale of upper middleclass sex, drugs and marital deceit with character types which you hope don’t exist in the real world but unfortunately probably do in the rural upper middle classes. Sally Beauman’s Landscape of Love one of the club’s summer books had similar unbelievably awful characters. A Perfect Life isn’t as bad as that, at least Rafaella Barker can write reasonably well. I particularly liked some of the details of the domestic world around her characters which I assume are based on incidents recorded from her own life. Maybe the whole book is in response to something which happened in her life. Not sure I want to know. Would be awful to think that someone’s life revolved around such crass unthinking characters where sex and sexual deceit was the be all and end all of life. Selfishness seems to pervade this novel on all sides. Angel doesn’t seem to have taken the trouble to understand Nick’s alcoholism and Nick doesn’t seem to know what makes Angel tick and not just with regard to whether she likes oral sex. I suppose if I got anything from this novel it was that partners need to take time to talk with each other particular when they are busy with bringing up children and work. I think I’m glad I don’t have any but maybe that is being selfish.
Copyright © 2007 Archant Regional Limited. All rights reserved. Terms and conditions