23 May 2013 12:04:44
The story takes us through one year in the life of an Anglican primary school, deep in the most bourgeois Boden country. First day back, the new headmaster explains that government cuts have kyboshed his plans for a new library, and so the elite St Ambrose Fundraising Committee is born. The calendar commences with a Lunch Ladder: "one person has a lunch, charges £15 a head, and those who attend have a lunch in turn and so on". It's followed by the Lakeside Summer Ball, which happens in December. The Gourmet Gamble. The Car Boot Sale. The Quiz. There's also divorce, bullying, a cancer scare, a suicide, but these are as nothing against the real drama. Who will the queen Bea include in today's group text for post-dropoff jogging, Pilates, Nordic walking? Who will emerge from the playground power struggles as the new top mum?
Of the viewpoints proffered on this matter, Rachel's is the one we hear most. A mother of two, she works as an illustrator, hence her interest in kitchens: "to kids' books what the attic was to horror: the place to which your hero – or your hero's wellies – always had to go". But there's also Georgie, effortlessly cool and clever and fertile – four and counting – and blessed on top of that with "natural, classy, skinny good looks". And Heather, who is none of these things: "Sometimes, just sometimes, in her darker moments … she just wondered if, well, if she wouldn't have been better off having no children at all, rather than just the one." When Georgie has to host the Lunch Ladder, she chucks together figs, beets, herbs and leaves, freshly picked from her kitchen garden. When it's Heather's turn she tries for "filet de canard avec sauce de raisin et des pine kernel thingies et tempura des endives with, um, er, cauliflower dumplings", as seen on Come Dine with Me.
Hornby's debut novel, it says on the cover, is "already a sensation", "the book every publisher wanted". It deserves all of it really, for the richness of the concept. You can watch Hornby on Vimeo, talking about how she had the idea while reading Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes, the advice manual on which Tina Fey based her screenplay for the movie Mean Girls. As Hornby saw, it isn't just teenage girls who do cliques and gossiping and bitching. Given the right sort of closed system, the mothers are even worse. The primary-school playground is exactly such a system: all that vulnerability and aggression bouncing around, like lightning. The classical drama would be another.
The main story, truth be told, is formulaic: hearts of gold are rewarded, feet of clay are trampled down to dust. And the sexual politics are unenterprising, lesbian tea notwithstanding – suffice it to say that the new head isn't called Mr Orchard for nothing. People grow, love blossoms, projects branch and take fruit at every flick of his magic wand. Also, the overwhelming middle-classness could do with a bit more self-awareness. Melissa, for example, she of the supremely "kitchenly" kitchen, single-handedly saves the car-boot sale from a mob of "large, burly, pot-bellied" bargain-hunters, crawling over Rachel's Volvo "like maggots" and bellowing for "bacon sarnies".
There are, though, lots of nice bits. "With her expert eye Bubba could look at every figure and see straight through to the exercise or dietary regime behind it … She could even spot a just-irrigated colon from at least 20 paces." A tense family situation has "that piquant Arab/Israeli-with-a-twist-of-Northern-Ireland flavour". And although, I'm afraid, I could not stick the glorious Georgie and her secret self-preening about how "her life now", at home on her rich husband's farm with her brilliant children, has become "one of pure, fine, distilled creativity", I did like the bit about how she gets her children out of the car in a hurry. Give a "quick sharp tug" to the first one you can reach, and you'll find the rest then "come out in clumps … like clothes out of the washing machine". IKWYM, as they say on Mumsnet. Genuinely charming. Lolz.
