This Charming Man
Reviews
PADDY De Courcy, deputy leader of the New Ireland party, is getting married, and four very different
women are shaken to the core by the news. Marian Keyes sets off this emotional depth
charge at the beginning of her latest novel, and we watch the shockwaves ripple outwards and affect these women. After being dumped by Paddy for Alicia "horse face" Thornton, Lola Daly is told by her friend Bridie that she would never have cut it as a politician's wife anyway: "Your clothes are too cool and you have purple highlights"
Lola is inconsolable, she keeps a diary to an almost obsessive compulsive degree, and she could well be the finest character of her type since Adrian Mole. She rings Paddy 50 times a day, and as she and her business start to unravel she develops into a wonderfully engaging character - the kind that Helen Melding could only dream of creating. She's hapless and hilarious, and her self-imposed exile in a small village is full of warmth and wit.
Grace Gildee is made of sterner stuff. As a features writer with The Spokesman, she spends her time competing with Casey Kaplan, friend of rock stars and supermodels, and a man who always gets the scoop while looking cool and decadent (as if such a character could exist in Dublin media circles - ahem). Grace and boyfriend Damien are struggling with nicotine withdrawal after agreeing to give up cigarettes as a gesture of solidarity for her aunt Bid who is suffering from lung cancer. ("Don't try and hug me, I'll puke.") Meanwhile, Grace's twin sister Marnie watches her family life disintegrate in London, as her attempts at finding happiness are marred by a tendency towards self destruction.
Keyes swaps the story back and forth between these women, teasing out connections between them and De Courcy, and leaving tantalising gaps in the narrative at all the right moments. Her storytelling skills never falter. There is no better writer for constructing comic scenes and setting up a punch line. She is served beautifully by her wonderful sense of the absurd and her flawless sense of timing. Her serious scenes also have perfect dramatic symmetry, and she fills in characters with deft brush strokes. Paddy De Courcy is a particularly good example of a character who could have so easily descended into stereotypical cad territory, but instead Keyes serves up a portrait of a complex and disgusting man with only a few lines of dialogue.
The subject of domestic violence is broached in one perfectly nuanced moment, when what begins as an incident of high farce shifts almost imperceptibly into a scene of quiet but shocking brutality. Each section is preceded by a horrific incident of domestic violence, and it's the unflinching honesty of these scenes that makes them so affecting, without once feeling like bad melodrama. Keyes also writes of one character's depression so convincingly that their pain simply oozes off the page. She is a sublimely gifted writer. She can write sexy and funny (sometimes at the same time), her comedy is warm, her pathos gentle, and she expertly balances misery and pain with hope and light..
Most reviews of Marian Keyes's novels are written with an undercurrent of shame, as if the reader had felt somewhat tainted by the experience of enjoying her work. Phrases like "well written for the kind of book it is" and "easy to read" are used to apologise for having enjoyed such low-brow "popular drivel! 'The truth is that it's time to stop apologising: Marian Keyes writes real literature, and her writing is of the highest order. Someone should give this woman a Booker.