Jolly Super

I love Jilly Cooper. I suppose I mean I love her books since I have never met her and she obviously inhabits a very different social stratum to me, but from her novels I feel I have a shrewd idea of what she is like as a person. My favourite has always been ‘Score’ as it combines the usual cast of characters set against a musical backdrop with a nicely plotted murder. Yesterday and this morning I galloped through three of her much earlier novels about young women, Harriet, Imogen, and Octavia. The upper class names say it all. They provided utterly enjoyable light reading, formulaic (the formula being very much her own) but having some real insights into human nature.

Two of the heroines are forerunners for many of her subsequent heroines, overweight (or think they are) with frizzy hair (hair like Jilly Cooper’s own in fact) and unfashionably flushed faces. They are forced to watch whilst the man they long for is swept away by events and other women, then, because of their misery, they lose weight, go pale, turn into swans, whilst their red-eyed suffering and  their beautiful, naive, innocent and kindly natures win Mr. Right.  Yes, it’s schmaltzy, and possibly ridiculous, but satisfying. I’ve always loved happy-ending fairy stories. The third young woman is a spoilt bitch who has always been lovely but in her determination to forget her deep unhappiness and insecurities, sets out to hunt down and seduce any and every man in her orbit, including the one engaged to her best friend. A good spanking is what she needs and a good spanking is what she gets. Predictably she falls in love with the spanker. Her humiliation does not end there; she becomes poor and is forced to work for a while at jobs she is ill equipped for. We get very little detail of her working conditions. This sordid and potentially depressing interlude doesn’t take up many pages before she is rescued from doing something dreadful in an attempt to save her brother from penury or knee-capping, (I can’t remember which.) Thus the good in her is unveiled and Mr.Right (the spanker of course) comes along to rescue her from a fate worse than death, and the tax man.

The heroines throughout her works, fictional and non-fictional, tend to follow these prototypes. They are painfully sensitive to other people’s unhappiness, have huge affection for dogs, cats, horses, and suffer if they are suffering. They fall in love with playboys, or the most irascible, rude, damaged and embittered men, becoming the catalyst for change through kindness and goodness. The inevitable culmination of their story comes in the last few pages. 

Not great literature but perhaps what is needed in a shallow world. Good triumphing over evil in a glamorous, Diorissimo-scented, non-demonic way. Some of the characters are ‘portable,’ that is they walk out of the novel and follow one home. She is an astute observer of human behaviour and is compassionate with what she sees. Her books show the understanding of a psychologist; they also have soul. From all I read about her she has been through some rough times herself and found ways to deal with those times, translating them into stories, lacing them with humour, but never belittling either life-events or people.