Amy
Jenkins created and wrote 'This Life' for BBC2, which was an incredibly
intelligent and compulsive piece of viewing. On hearing that Jenkins has
written a novel, you immediately picture a huge Dickensian affair of modern London
life with multiple characters. Instead of this, we get 'Honeymoon'.
'Honeymoon' is the narrator, and you can't help but groan as soon as you hear
her name. One of the most attractive things about 'This Life' was its
ensemble cast of men and women. Here you only get Honey as a first person
narrator, and you immediately feel bereft. Yep, the portraits of men in
'Honeymoon' are okay, but you don't really get any deep insights into any of
the characters. Jenkins is scrupulously fair, mentioning that in the
majority of marriage break-ups, it's the women who have walked out. But
this is as about as close to real life, or any life, as 'Honeymoon' gets.
Take 'Mac', for example, Honey's boss. He's something big in Hollywood,
we're told. But we never really get to see what he does, apart from
paying air fares at propitious moments (a lot of the events in the novel seem
dependent on the old-fashioned device of Providence). Because Honey is so
shallow, you never really get to care about her, despite her sob story of being
orphaned when young. Ed, her groom to be, is so anonymous that he could
be Anyman. There is the odd bit of humour, but never really enough to
make the novel sparkle. Ed is right when he observes that Honey is far
from reaching the heights in the hilarity stakes. Everything about
this novel is so... comfortable. Honey and Ed arrive in New York by
accident en route to their Honeymoon, and Ed thinks nothing about abandoning
their reservations in Mexico to stay in Manhattan. Poor little rich kids,
you sigh. Even their best friends and employer turn up in New York.
Later on, when Honey has to agonise about returning to England, or making a new
life for herself in LA, the fact that she does have such a coterie
really renders this dramatic choice meaningless.
There are moments of high drama which ultimately fail to get your pulse
racing. Jenkins refers to a lot of Cult TV and movies (with Honey
ultimately losing all credibility when she claims that Roger Moore was the best
Bond), and maybe reading novels is not her first choice of recreation.
But you still feel she could have produced something much more meaty than
this. The main story is really too girlie to have any great appeal.
On the back cover, the legend is 'Fiction: General' which just about sums it
up. We were expecting the exceptional: all we've got is something
which feels like it was ghost-written for Naomi Campbell. We want Amy
Jenkins the trend-setter back, not someone who'll leap onto an already overburdened
bandwagon.
AuthorTrek
Rating: 6/10
Kevin
Patrick Mahoney
