FICTION: ANNE MARKEYreviews Happy Ever Afterby Patricia Scanlon
HAPPY EVER Afteris a continuation of Forgive and Forget, Patricia Scanlan's 2008 blockbuster novel, which was recently shortlisted for the Eason Irish Popular Fiction Book of the Year. As both novels feature the same cast of characters, deal with similar issues affecting the lives of middle-class women of different ages, and are narrated with equal verve and good humour, it is not surprising the sequel is already a bestseller and looks set to match the success of the original.
Newly married Debbie is finding it difficult to cope with the mounting debts accumulated by her feckless, coke-snorting husband. Her father, Barry, has money troubles of his own, but they pale in comparison to the problems he is having with his second wife, Aimee, whose career takes priority over everything else in her life. Aimee is none too happy either when she discovers that she is pregnant and is even less so when Barry scuppers her plans to have a secret termination.
Melissa, their teenage daughter, is obsessed with losing weight and well on the way to developing an eating disorder. Meanwhile, Judith, Debbie’s boss, suffers a breakdown while recovering from serious injuries sustained in a car crash.
To offset all this gloom, Lily, Judith’s elderly mother, gets a new lease of life as she overcomes the anxiety that has kept her housebound for years; half-sisters Debbie and Melissa draw mutual support from their fledgling friendship; and, best of all, Connie, Debbie’s mother, meets a handsome, caring man.
Like the proverbial curate's egg, some aspects of Happy Ever Afterare excellent. The disparate storylines concerning the well-drawn female characters are carefully balanced to provide a convincing portrait of how friendship between women can offset the negative effects of both the recession and the shortcomings of the men with whom they are involved. Unfortunately, those men emerge as one-dimensional figures, who are either self-absorbed or, in the case of Connie's new man, everything a woman could want.
At one point, one of the characters, Juliet, who has had enough of her husband treating her like a servant, decides that she will no longer live like a “little, wifely doormat”. Instead of cooking breakfast and setting out his golf clothes, she snuggles down for a lie-in with the latest Cathy Kelly, finding within its pages the type of comfort and distraction not provided by the worthy titles suggested on her book-club reading list.
Despite its title, though, the reader of Happy Ever Afterwill not derive similar satisfaction from the latest Patricia Scanlan, because the ending of the novel leaves too many narrative threads dangling. Connie's storyline is the only one to reach any type of tentative conclusion, while the others are left in a state of suspended animation, presumably preparing the way for a third novel about these now familiar characters.
No doubt, loyal Patricia Scanlan readers and other devotees of popular fiction will tune in same time next year to discover if it is possible to be happy ever after.
Anne Markey is a postdoctoral researcher on the IRCHSS-sponsored Early Irish Fiction project at TCD