Reviews

In structure and appearance, This Charming Man is pure chick-lit. Four women each have a dark secret involving their separate relationships with a high-profile, high- charisma Irish politician, one Paddy de Courcy.
One of the women is Grace, a former lover, who is now a ruthless journalist. She wants the inside story on de Courcy's impending marriage. Another is his fiancée, Alicia, appearing in celebrity magazines beside the handsome TD. The third is the journalist's twin sister Marnie, married with children and working in England for a financial brokerage firm, but miserable -- she can't shake the memories of her first lover, Paddy de Courcy. The fourth is his girlfriend, Lola, a stylist, someone who dresses, accessorises and placates rich women for high-profile social events.
Lola has been Paddy's girlfriend for the past 16 months, but now she's on the verge of a breakdown caused by being dumped by him and, even worse, reading newspaper reports of his forthcoming nuptials to another woman. This doesn't stop her resenting anybody who describes her Molichino highlights as purple, or observing that, "It's not on to hold your wedding reception in the K Club if you're not a horsey Kildare type." To ease her stress, she heads for an uncle's cottage in the country for a rural idyll:
"Waves and swelling and white bits and sun glinting. Smell of ozone and salt and all that. Gazed upon nature and beauty and everything and thought, I miss shops."
Lola isn't just short of a boyfriend. She's also short on definite and indefinite articles. She talks like a text message, as does everybody she relates to -- including her dead mother, with whom she has conversations in graveyards. She's fairly promiscuous about the graveyards she uses for this purpose, not confining herself to the one her mother is actually interred in.
She spares her dead mother her otherwise constant references to trendy venues, shoes, luggage, cars and accessories, these references establishing that Lola -- except in graveyards -- is hip and happening. Relentlessly hip and happening.
To any reader north of 25, Lola is a hip and happening bore of stunning proportions, which makes her a useful foil for the quite different character of Grace, the journalist, who would sell her grandmother for a story and who knows she doesn't appreciate her boyfriend sufficiently. But it's the journalist's twin sister, Marnie, who is at the heart of this book, as the reader gradually realises that this mother of two daughters is an alcoholic, struggling to survive life and happiest when she is out of it on booze.
No modern Irish writer has handled alcohol-addiction as Marian Keyes does.
She evokes the mindset of the addict with such detachment, sympathy and shockingly truthful observation that the ostensibly central theme of this novel -- the multiple toxic layers of a womanising politician of massive ambition and minimal moral core -- becomes background noise to the playing out of the personal tragedy and redemption of the character named Marnie.
These four very different women, one awfully charming man and a secret that binds them all together, makes for a fascinating story. And in the middle is the future Mrs de Courcy, Alicia, determined to be the perfect politician's wife. But does she know the real Paddy?
Marian Keyes doesn't like politicians, that's for sure. Having worked constantly with the breed for more than 20 years, I love them. Not all of them, all of the time. But a lot of them, from all parties. Let's face it, no other profession attracts so many high-ego, high-octane, high-intellect and highly sexed individuals, filled with permanent excitement, rage, hope, idealism, venality, wit, profanity, flaws and fun.
Paddy de Courcy -- if we're to judge by the women he loves, leaves and mutilates -- is all of that, although, because we see him through their eyes and through the consequences of his acts, he remains somewhat shadowy.
This massive, 700-page novel shows why Marian Keyes has become a literary phenomenon whose books go immediately to the top of the international best-seller lists. Chick-lit readers can rely on her to provide fast-moving love interest locked, by constant reference to issues of style and showbiz, into the zeitgeist.
But within that recurring package is a novelist constantly pushing against predictability, a master ofcharacter-delineation, who can mix farce and sex with serious social issues.
This Charming Man is Dickensian in its scale, plotting and determination to force the reader to grasp some of the grim realities of today's Ireland. Chick-lit it isn't. A great read it is.