This Charming Man
Reviews
FICTION: This Charming Man By Marian Keyes, Michael Joseph, 676pp. £17.99. Marian Keyes' new novel is her best yet, with its ingenius multi-layered plot and theme of abusive relationships.
HE'S CHARMING and he's a monster. He sucks you in to his world despite yourself, seducing and flattering you into believing that you, and only you, can satisfy his carnal desires - desires he convinces you were really yours all along. Ever wanted to dance with the devil? Marian Keyes gives a brilliant account of what this might be like and, believe me, you don't want to go there.
Well, actually, you do. Safely. In a book. And that's the secret to Marian Keyes. She lures you into thinking that you're safe, then packs a wallop that has you weeping and questioning your life two-thirds of the way through. Keyes's multi-layered plotting has never been as ingenious as in this, her ninth novel, and 10th book.
She communicates on a literal, sensual, visceral level. Good writing gives you a peek into another person's soul. Great writing transports you into a world that you're more than observing - you're living within it, discovering parts of yourself you hoped didn't exist.
Even though you're more likely to see her reviewed in Heat than in the TLS, Keyes has achieved great writing because she has resisted the temptations of stylistic showing off, flippancy and the repetition of a successful formula. Every paragraph and page has to have been worked through in order for it to look this easy. She keeps setting herself new challenges and growing from book to book. In her last novel, Anybody Out There? (2006), Keyes successfully brought us inside the head of a young widow, while simultaneously positing a critique on the exploitative fashion industry - a tall order.
With This Charming Man , she takes even bigger risks and amplifies her characterisation. In her acknowledgements, she apologises that "this book took an embarrassingly long time to write". Proper order. The extra time she took really shows. It's her best book yet.
Her biggest risk is to give us - on the surface - a novel about a smooth-talking, charismatic politician and the women in his life, while all along offering deep insight into the existential issues of identity, loneliness and sexuality - sexistentialism, if you like. As she builds her argument, she holds her fire for her real agenda - the question of why so many women engage in abusive relationships with men, with booze and with each other.
The structural device she uses is clever and complex: almost from the outset, we know that one of the women has been abused by her lover, but Keyes keeps us guessing which one. A series of anonymous first-person descriptions of being abused are placed at crucial points, until we gradually realise that these cries from the heart could apply to any character in the novel, to any one of us. By the time we learn who this victim is, we have so strongly identified with her that we can draw only one conclusion. We are all potential victims, powerless when addicted to a man, to sex, or even to social prestige.
Yes, there's a bad guy in this book, but the bad guy exists only because the women in his life are willing to play along.
Keyes's depiction of alcohol addiction, as experienced by Marnie, a mother of young children, is more compelling than that in her first book, Rachel's Holiday . The retching, the hidden bottles, the lying and through it all Marnie's desperate belief that she is still a "good mother", is painful to read.
Yet in alternating chapters Keyes also creates Lola, a personal shopper/stylist who caters to wealthy Dublin women in need of six costume-changes per day for their charity work. When Lola runs away to Ennistymon, Co Clare and finds herself blackmailed into running a transvestite support group, Keyes is writing her funniest lines ever.
And then there's Grace, the tabloid journalist, who has to deal with her sister, Marnie, as well as attempting to find true sexual intimacy in her life while dealing with a bitchy female boss. And Alicia, the perfect woman, who discovers she is engaged to "this charming man", only when she reads it in the Sunday papers.
The device of intertwining several women's lives was invented by Jane Austen, reprised by Maeve Binchy and has been used again and again by best-selling women authors. It may look easy, but there's real skill in creating chapters and scenes which, like shattered mirrors, reflect back various perspectives and shards of life. What Keyes does in this book that is new is to vary the style of writing so dramatically from character to character, chapter to chapter - even using distinctive typefaces for characters. This disparate style of narrative reflects the way we think today, as we switch from channel to channel, not just on TV but in our relationships and careers. Her skill at creating a feeling of universal anxiety and impermanence, while also keeping the page-turning flow of the novel's various themes, is what makes Keyes shatter-proof.