A Rural Affair

Catherine Alliott

Penguin

Otago Daily Times , 2011

At first glance, A Rural Affair didn’t seem particularly promising.  I have an innate mistrust of any book proclaiming its author as The Number One Best Seller, and when the blurb on the back of asked “Will [newly widowed] Poppy have the courage to follow her heart and refuse to settle for second best?” I was certain that I was faced yet another tiresome story of female mid-life crisis and reinvention.

Part of the problem is that it is hard to summarise the plot without resorting to cliché because what makes this novel stand out is the way that it ticks all the required boxes of the chic-lit genre whilst simultaneously circumventing them. The first indication that this might be something more than a cookie-cutter genre piece was the revelation that Poppy’s husband, an obsessive cyclist, was killed in full Lycra-clad splendour by a block of frozen pee fallen from a passing aeroplane.

A similarly quirky humour pervades the entire novel, and all attempts at pretension are immediately deflated; a book club set up as a way for the four friends to check out eligible males founders when they attempt to step up from John Gresham to James Joyce, and Poppy’s attendance at the opening Hunt of the season reduces it to chaos.

Poppy’s best friends (a rich, separated socialite, an eccentric but wise older widow, and a shambolically competent earth-mother) are also permitted to expand beyond their stereotypes into fuller and more sympathetic characters. Even the incidental characters that people the village in which the novel are set are described with affection. My favourites are Molly, an elderly member of the choir who isn’t “quite like other budgerigars” who sings Nights in White Satin regardless of the actual number being performed, and Polly’s father, who is a delight. As for Poppy herself, she tells her story with a gentle, self-deprecating humour makes her genuinely likeable, a quality I rarely associate with the tiresomely introspective narrators of most chic-lit I have read.

Although the plot ends up exactly where you would expect, the route is full of surprising little kinks. Every time I succumbed (with self-satisfied contempt) to the assumption I knew exactly where the plot was going, I was immediately proved wrong.  One of the advantages of being a reviewer is the chance to read books I would otherwise never pick up.  For every disappointment there is a real treasure. A Rural Affair is one such pearl.