MR WONDERFUL is Alice's prey; Alice is 38 and single, and has been hunting the elusive beast for most of her life - in fact, since she used to sit with her school friend Laren gazing at her tropical fish and constructing a blueprint for the ideal man.
Grace Wynne-Jones's protagonist is a journalist who is sick of her life. Alice's days are spent writing sex advice for the magazine where she works. "If you want a man with passion, then try pasta," she writes. "Pet foods are good if you want someone a bit more cosy and kind, especially if they buy the more upmarket brands and titbits."
Her search for the Wonderful Man is becoming more desperate by the day. She has agreed - or half-agreed - to marry Eamon, "the last man I had sex with, quite handsome in a restrained, well-ordered kind of way". He and Alice don't talk much.
This is the classic romance set-up - Mr Dull, and somewhere nearby, Mr Wonderful. In the case of Wise Follies, it's Messrs Wonderful: Alice falls in love with a dashing potter, in clumpy sandals, while sniffily ignoring the youngish teacher next door. And why not, indeed the teacher wears tweed jackets with leather elbows, even if he is winningly friendly to her cat, Tarquin.
Grace Wynne-Jones has a wicked sense of humour, which enlivens every page. As Alice considers going to Paris, she points out: "I know Paris. I like it. Not everything about it of course, but enough. I'll take sneering lessons if necessary.
This is a book full of entertaining characters. The neighbour, Mrs Peabody, and her foul-beaked budgie are great fun. The sultry, clay-daubed lust interest, James Mitchell, had me laughing out loud as Alice became more and more obsessed with him. There are hilariously embarrassing scenes of courtship as Alice forms a bowl or vase under his steely gaze. "He was standing very close to me", the first-person narrator pants. "At one point his arm reached across mine and our warm, naked, skin touched. I could even feel his little hairs.
Of course this could have happened because he was distracted - Mildred had just asked him a question ...
Alice's housemate, Mira, is training to be an eccentric spinster - and making quite a success of it. Mira has had a bit of a smash-up in love with a married man too honourable to leave his wife, and the result is that she is thoroughly off men. So she attends motorcycle maintenance classes and wears slippers to the shops, and tries not to weep when alone at night.
Laren has rewritten herself to become Laren Brassiere, gravel-voiced, grubby-haired songstress and terrapin-hater. Matt, Alice's gay friend, and Annie, who has cornered the EU Man Mountain, offer support in times of trouble.
The characters interweave more than the plot, which stays concentrated on Alice's search without too much action of a sort which might question the basic premise. Mira's and Laren's and Mrs Peabody's and even the budgie's personal stories are sorted out in the end, but have impacted relatively little on the main action.
Grace Wynne-Jones writes stage and radio plays, publishes stories in magazines and works as a journalist. She was brought up in Ireland, in her father's country rectories, and later lived in Africa, England and America. Wise Follies is a pleasant read for a summer holiday, and will certainly be packed and eagerly passed around on the beaches this year. Alice and her friends, and her hilarious magazine assignments, at times leave the reader rocking with laughter. Good fun for the holiday beach bag.
