Irish Independent
Heavy and light – the magic of Marian K.
At first glance, Marian Keyes' seventh novel looks right at home in he shelf of carnival covers marked `chicklit'. It has a boldly-coloured, girly image on the front, a perky-sounding title and a breezy blurb on the back of the book, promising a bit of a whodunit set among the stiletto-shaped skyscrapers of New York:
But any reader expecting a giddy gigglefest with lots of sex and shopping and plots involving men behaving badly, has picked the wrong chick. Marian Keyes can do froth with the best of them, but her silver linings often come with a dark cloud attached. Since her first novel, Watermelon, was published in 1995 she has sold more than 15 million books which frequently tackle subjects like depression and serious illness.
And Anyone Out There? continues Keyes' practice of serving up a serious subject with a large dollop of humour. The story opens with Anna Walsh recuperating from some sort of bad accident - we don't find out what happened to her until almost a third of the way into the book. She's flown back to Dublin to recover; leaving behind her high-flying life in New York - aglamorous job in beauty PR, and Aidan, her handsome husband of a year who has gone missing.
Anna's family are a rambunctious bunch; she has four sisters, the youngest of whom, Helen, is an enthusiastic but somewhat inept private investigator, and an eccentric and sometimes inept mother. There are two storylines; the main plot revolves around Anna, and her struggle to come to terms with her earth-shattering loss; the second sub-plot involves Helen and her increasingly dangerous entanglement with Dublin's top criminal who hires her to spy on his wife.
Anna is an extremely likeable character who, even while in the deepest trough of bewilderment and hurt, manages to hold on to her wry and sometimes sardonic sense of humour which serves both as a defence mechanism and crucial survival tool.
While at home in Dublin recovering, Anna is nicknamed `Frankenstein' by a gang of neighbourhood urchins. "It had upset me the first time they'd said it. Especially when they offered me money to lift my bandages and show them my cuts. It was like being asked to lift my t-shirt and show them my knockers, only worse."
Keyes writes with enormous compassion; she understands that sometimes bad things happen to good people for no reason at all, and that life is a messy and unpredictable business. She tells the story of Anna's grief in a way that is moving but never morbid, and sympathetic without being maudlin.
By comparison; the sub-plot of Helen's jolly japes in the criminal underworld is a little silly and a bit pointless. It almost seems as if Keyes doesn't trust her own ability to keep her readers with her throughout the more profound plot; without adding a helping of standard chick-lit carry on to keep them happy.
But they will stay with her, for Keyes can blend heavy and light together in a style that's smart, sassy and thoroughly absorbing. She really doesn't need to hide behind the frilly frocks of chick lit anymore.
Lise Hand writes the daily diary Lise At Large for the Irish Independent