Whilst holidaying in a French villa last summer I came
across an old battered copy of Dawn French’s epistolary memoirs Dear Fatty. I dipped in and out of it as
a break from my uni summer reading list, and found that its hilarious laugh out
loud moments, unashamed honesty, and unmistakable Dawn Frenchesque voice was a
more than welcome relief. For this reason, as well as a love for The Vicar of Dibley which I’m sure the
rest of humanity shares, I was excited when her new novel Oh Dear Silvia was announced. It has received rave reviews which
assured me of its dark hilarity and gripping storyline, and when it came out
this week in paperback it shot straight to number one in the overall charts.
So naturally, I got stuck in as quickly as possible. Now
this next sentence is pretty hard for me to type but….I was disappointed. I don’t
pretend to be any form of authority over Dawn French, little old me second year
English student casual blogger versus Queen of Comedy, and I can’t deny the
numerous people who have loved this book, but in my honest opinion it just wasn’t
for me. However, I did stick with it, and that is definitely saying something –
the sign of a truly awful book is the overwhelming desire to throw it into the
nearest bin/fire/mass of water, and I didn’t quite get that with this.
The premise is definitely an interesting one: a woman in a
coma having somehow fallen off a balcony is visited by various
relatives/friends/acquaintances, each chapter is written in one of these people’s
perspectives. We therefore gather a view of Silvia without ever having even met
her, purely through the conflicting but revealing narrations of her visitors. I guess in hind sight this was the reason I was
slightly hooked - as each character revealed something more, I wanted to find
out the next chapter (excuse the pun) in the storyline. However, what’s
slightly off-putting is the obviousness of all these revelations. At times I felt
as though I was being completely patronised by the assumption that I needed
quite so much repetition to understand what exactly was being said. Obviously
this is personal preference, but I always like a little mystery, or at least to
feel as though I worked a bit to work out the meaning of it all.
Another flaw with this seemingly exciting and intriguing
foundation is French’s use of tenses. I realise this sounds a little middle
school English teacher, but it got to the point where it really bugged me and I
couldn’t ignore it. At times I DID feel as though I was reading an un-edited
school student’s short story. It’s hard to fully criticise this when putting
yourself in French’s shoes: the documentation of the present conscience of a
person who is feeling in the here and now, looking into the past, AND
predicting the future is a potentially impossible task to do gracefully. I
certainly couldn’t think of a better way I would have handled it, but this did
not take away from the fact that the overuse of the present tense where it
seemed inappropriate came off as pretty clumsy and awkward a lot of the time.
It also confused me as to whether there was an omniscient narrator present or
it was supposed to be the direct thoughts of each character – in which case
perhaps first person may have fitted better. Perhaps this all stems from too much
time spent scrutinising the technicalities of each and every piece of writing I
read or write, feel free to blame my tutors, but something didn’t sit
completely right with me.
What I did find as I got further into the book was that the
far-fetched storyline and over-exaggerated characters are not so offensive once
you decide to just let yourself enjoy them and try not to see them so
seriously. After all – this book IS written by a comedian, and it is not in
shortage of comic moments. But for me, the laugh out loud element I was so
expecting was missing – much of the comedy was kind of lost on me as I felt I needed
Dawn French’s distinctive comic timing and tone to carry it along – something I
couldn’t quite recreate in my head. With this in mind, I would definitely give
the audio book a go. Having spoken to a few other people about it, we agreed
that it seemed more of a script than a
novel – not surprising given French’s fantastic well-known script writing for French and Saunders. However unrealistic
this plot may at first seem, it is ultimately a study into human behaviour and
a questioning of how well we really know that person we think we are closest
to. Having finished it, what really stuck in my mind was not any of the things
that may have annoyed me, but the unique fact that the protagonist is never
given a word or a view – something I have never experienced in a book before.
This may seem like a majorly negative review, but I found
this book a real thinker – its surface characters and obvious storyline carried
me along as I read it, slowly getting slightly agitated by certain aspects, but
afterwards my focus has switched to the overall theme of human relationships
and behaviour – which I feel makes this book a success.
Greed Satisfaction Scale: At times I felt on the point of nausea and certainly overfilled by certain aspects whilst some of the yummier parts were lacking, but on reflection this interesting combination was something I have better memories of than I felt I would whilst digesting it.
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