Serena
Mackesy's first novel, 'The Temp', was derived from a newspaper column.
However, her aim did not appear to be a desire to keep up with the Bridget
Joneses. She just produced a solidly plotted novel, which was far more
grounded in reality than any fling with a flirt called Darcy. Indeed, it
was very refreshing to read a modern novel with a female protagonist who didn't
spend all her time swooning over men. There was romance in 'The Temp',
but the aspect that I found most appealing was the depth of the
book. Mackesy had worked as a temp herself, and she brought this world
alive with fascinating detail. But more important than this, was the fact
that Mackesy had written a brilliant and extremely entertaining novel, and one
which bode well for the future.
'The Temp' was
a bit of a hybrid - the beginning of the novel, although brilliantly
composed, did betray the fact that it had started off as a newspaper
column. Would Mackesy be capable of producing another great novel after
she'd used up all her temp knowledge, would she have staying power beyond the
temp thing? The answer is yes, Serena Mackesy most definitely has considerable
talent as a novelist, and there are many more feathers which she can pluck from
her hat. After all, her current 'day' job is as a journalist, so she
should have an inexhaustible source of inspiration. It's a route which
other journalists before her have successfully tackled, as they portrayed the
jaundiced world of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Again, it's her great eye for
detail, the beautiful way that she that brings shared observations to mind, and
her exacting curiosity which makes me always desire to read her work. If
you've pondered about the little mysteries in life, then you've got no better
person to turn to for answers than Mackesy.
Having said
that, some of the people who exasperate me the most are those who read Freud
and say "it's so true!". I just feel that I've got to introduce
them to a guy called Little Hans... I guess I read Freud more for
the entertainment value than for worldly insight. I suppose it's that old
central dichotomy between dog and cat lovers, or those mad folk who prefer Aliens
to Alien, T2 to The Terminator, and never the Clemens shall meet, especially
those who are divided upon the proper use of clichés. The world which
Serena Mackesy presents is one that I very much identify with, even if I am one
of those people who hate to put creases into paperback spines (a very battered
copy of 'The Beach' features in 'Virtue'). No doubt this novel will also
be solidly marketed to female readers, and I would suggest that Mackesy's
audience is probably far wider than her publishers realise.
Anna Waters, the narrator of 'Virtue', has been brought up by her prize winning
mum in a hothouse environment. She's lived under the heavy burden of
expectation, propelled to pass her first degree whilst her peers are still
struggling with their nappy pins. Anna has a bit of a struggle in
order to live up to her mother's standards, since her parent is a perfectionist
in everything, even to the extent of winning popular music awards. Grace
Waters is one of those people who read Freud and say "Yes, it's
true!" and then tries to put it all into practice, mixed in with other
junk theorists like Bowlby. Yet Grace's designs to imprint her daughter
in her image all collapse when Anna meets Harriet, a floricidal aristocrat, who
has a rather more reckless approach to life. Under Harriet's guidance,
Anna finally ends her stoic misery and gets to go to all night parties and off
with men.
This may sound
all light and frothy and girlie, but it's not. Okay, so for the first few
pages, I did think the world that Mackesy was writing about was maybe a little
too fantastic, too removed from the reality of 'The Temp'. You don't have
to be a Nobel prize winner to work out who Harriet's mum is based upon, a woman
who still manages to court controversy years after her very public death.
Here Mackesy is treading on dangerous ground: the division between those
who love dogs and those who love cats certainly isn't as wide as that between
those who grieved and those who became aggreived by the mourning. Mackesy
boldly tackles one of the most biting issues in British journalism today:
privacy. Why on earth does anyone desire the attention of press, and what
happens to those who are unintentionally caught in the flashlights? Do
the press have the right to patent you just because you share half your genes
with a famous parent? To steal your soul and print it on the front
page?
This probably
makes 'Virtue' sound just as vocational a novel as 'The Temp' was.
Yes, Mackesy does entertain with her expose of the dregs of Canary Wharf (does
Murdoch ever appreciate the irony of relocating his press hounds into a place
named after the Latin for 'dog'?). But it's all the other pixels of the
picture which also illuminate, like the journey into London's catering world,
the William Morris carpets at Harriet's boarding school, and the depiction of
Trustaffarian life. There's also delicious irony in the publicity of a
novel which straddles the Nature/Nurture debate revealing that Mackesy is the
granddaughter of Margaret Kennedy, author of 'The Constant Nymph', a bestseller
in the 1920s. According to A level English, every part of a novel has to
add up to its whole, and 'Virtue' certainly follows this path. This makes
'Virtue' sound every bit as being interesting as a dull wet Wednesday in
school, but this is the very world which Anna Waters has rejected.
She's out to have fun, and she's certainly not doing anyone any harm.
Mackesy goes to great lengths to create great characters who you really care
about, and then she puts them into situations of real danger. No wonder
I'm addicted to reading her.
AuthorTrek
Rating: 9/10.
Kevin
Patrick Mahoney
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