To write pastiche or not to write pastiche? On balance, not.

I've been a bit on the fence when it comes to pastiches. I confess that I hate historical novels set in medieval times to be written in a Ye Olde Style - as if medieval times weren't strange enough already. But when authors try to write in the style of Jane Austen, or the Victorian novelists, I do see what they're aiming for. If some of the best novels around are written in a certain style, I can understand if you want to emulate it. "Finding your own voice" is all very well, but if you could sing in perfect imitation of Kiri Te Kanawa, who would ask for "your own voice"? I'd love there to be even more Dickens novels, so if someone were to be able to pull off writing a novel or two exactly in the style of Dickens, I don't think I would complain.

The thing is, though - can you pull it off? I remember thinking Jane Dawkins succeeded in capturing a credible Austenesque tone in Letters from Pemberley and More Letters from Pemberley, but otherwise, Austen's style seems rather harder to copy than sequel-writers think, and the best "Austenuations" are mostly those written in the writer's own style. As for Dickens - well, he is called The Inimitable. And though he has been successfully (and funnily) parodied, I doubt that his style could be captured and held up for a whole novel, by anyone but the man himself.

What I'm trying to get at is that if pastiche is not 100 per cent credible as "the real thing", it comes between the book's content and the reader. It is, quite simply, an extremely tricky genre, and I'm not sure that attempting it instead of writing in the style that comes naturally to you is really worth the risk. What's prompted me to think about this was reading D.J. Taylor's Derby Day. It is written in a mock-Victorian style which simply didn't work for me.

I was disappointed in Derby Day, to be honest, because I got the distinct impression from reviews that it would be colourful, frothy fun and a bit of a guilty pleasure. Booker prize-covering articles sounded surprised that it had made the long list. In effect, it is an ambitious novel, especially when it comes to describing the atmosphere around Derby Day (which takes place at the end of the novel) a little in the manner of Frith's picture, by weaving all manner of little scenes involving different characters - more or less important to the book's plot - together. But as for froth - no. Though some of the characters were interesting, none (barring perhaps a long-suffering governess) was particularly pleasant. It was easier to root for the horse Tiberius than for any of them. There was a woeful lack of romance, and the villain was the kind of superficial cad I can't get much out of. Above all, I found the style a bar to my enjoyment of the book: it wasn't like Dickens, or like Collins, it only seemed unnecessarily knotty. The Victorian fondness for simile especially seemed to get in the author's way a bit: I didn't get the feeling that coming up with similes came naturally to him, as it did to Dickens, and in that case it might be better not to attempt it in the first place.

I'll give Derby Day its due, though: I finished it, because I did want to know who won the race. But it is not really a good advertisement for pastiche. If you enjoy richly textured description of scenes of Victorian life (I don't much - social-history phobia again), it's well worth giving this book a try: just don't expect high-jinks and melodrama.                         

Not falling for the villain (or similar)

Villain crushes are like the pot that won’t boil if you watch it. When you’re actively seeking a new flame, you will mostly find nothing. The worrying thing is that so many of my crushes start with a “surely not?” phase, where I am in denial about having fallen at all, and I’m sligthly anxious about what taboo I’m going to break next.  There seems to be little rhyme or reason to when villain infatuations strike –they just happen, or don’t as the case may be.

How, for instance, can I explain my lack of enthusiasm for Doctor Simeon, later morphing into the Great Intelligence, in the latest episodes of Doctor Who? He’s Victorian, he’s chilly, he’s ruthless, he’s – well – intelligent: in sum, just my type. True, he’s played by Richard E. Grant, whom I have found vaguely unsettling in previous roles. However, I’ve always thought that this was because he was playing dashing blades (Sir Percy Blakeney, James Harthouse) or good eggs (Bob Cratchit) instead of villain roles, which he was obviously better suited for. Gosford Park seemed to bear me out: I approved of him as George the cynical footman (admittedly, it would have been hard to go wrong with a part like that).

In Doctor Who, though, the Grant-unsettling effect was still very much in evidence. Consequently, I had the weird experience of viewing a villain in the same way a majority of viewers do: with fear and even a little loathing. Instead of thinking “Yummy, what an adversary” I went “Yikes, I’d hate the likes of him messing with my past”. In a way, a triumph for Richard E. Grant then, as this was of course exactly how I was supposed to react. 

And why don’t I even like Thomas Watkins in Upstairs Downstairs? He’s not precisely a villain, but you could say that he’s a villain surrogate. He often behaves in a way no dyed-in-the-wool hero would get away with, and he’s got the cunning and ambition which you normally expect from the baddie. But I just can’t warm to the man. I’ve debated the point with myself roughly as follows.

“Why I don’t like Watkins? Well, he’s so shifty, isn’t he?”

“I thought you liked that in a manservant. And why don’t you call him Thomas?”
“Well, obviously I can’t. Anyway, Watkins only ever thinks of himself. He’d walk over corpses just to get on. Just look at how he lets the admittedly idiotic Mr Kirbridge down.”
“As I was saying…”
“And then he’s so cold in his personal life. He disappoints Rose, and I’m never quite convinced that he really loves Sarah. They both deserve better than him in my opinion.”
“I see, cold in his personal life. You mean like Mr Tulkinghorn? Or Bitzer? Or Balzac’s bankers?”
“Oh, just shut up, will you?”

As you can see, I can’t explain it, but there it is. In part, I can blame a latent bullish aggressiveness in Watkins’s character – even towards Rose, at one point – which I really don’t think is that common among my own diddle-diddle-darlings. Also, he came off rather badly in the spin-off series beguilingly titled Thomas and Sarah, where we learn that he didn’t make a success of his garage and he steadfastly refuses to marry his live-in-girlfriend Sarah. The spin-off ended – on a cliff-hanger too  – after only one series: I blame Watkins, plus the couple’s continuing bad luck (surely, also his fault).     

So, when it comes to villain crushes, maybe it’s just as well to stick with what I’ve got for the present. Away with embarrassment: sometime in the near future, I will buy that T-shirt with Downton’s Thomas on it and the caption “Trust me”. But the question remains when I’m going to wear it?    

Summer grumble

It starts with the bus stop tantrum. I seem to have one every year, in full view of a nervous audience of fellow travellers. The ongoing problem is, from the beginning of June to the middle of August, the bus timetables are changed and buses run much less frequently. This means you will either be far too early or a little late to wherever you're going - or, as is so often the case, much too late because the bus that is running is delayed (and packed, of course). Sometimes scheduled buses don't arrive at all. I certainly don't begrudge bus chauffeurs their holidays, but this drives me up the wall every single year. No effort seems to be made to keep time, and the impression you get is that the bus companies think that, hey, what does it matter, everyone's on holiday anyway. But I'm not on holiday. No-one's on holiday from June to August, worse luck. I'm still working, and the worst part of it is, I don't want to be. Having to run to catch a bus which then does not turn up or turns up ten minutes late only adds insult to injury.

The yearly bus stop tantrum is only a symptom of end-of-summer-term malaise. School is out, but work is still very much in. As the city shuts down around you and the TV channels start sending reruns, as the sun beats down and last-year pupils whoop and holler, enjoying one of the happiest days in their life, you are only too aware that your freedom is still far away - well, far-ish. It's not even as if things are slowing down, either at work or privately. There are so many things you need to fix "before the summer hols" that there is not much time for lazying in the sun - or out of it, comes to that.

But they will come, the holidays - and when they do, I'd quite like one of those famous good summer reads. In fact, I could do with one now. Why is it so hard to find an honest page turner? I tried another one of my family sagas and gave up after approximately a hundred pages - luscious descriptions of idyllic summer days full of honeysuckle, butterflies and what have you before Disaster Strikes (World War One) are not the best way to catch my interest. Not even Wilkie Collins can be relied on. The man in the black skull-cap in Hide and Seek turned out to be a sad disappointment - a Rough Diamond, if you please. I never much cared for men of the wild: I like my diamonds to be polished, thank you very much. Hide and Seek's plot reminded me of The Dead Secret in a way: in both novels, the characters who try to find out a secret and the ones trying to hide it are good-natured people, and so there is not much suspense. You know they will all get along swimmingly by the end. There was one plot twist I didn't see coming, but Hide and Seek still remains the weakest of the Wilkie Collins novel bunch. And even a pro-Victorian like myself must marvel at how little you need to do to be branded a vile seducer. No matter if you meant to marry the girl; no matter if you left the country not knowing she was pregnant; no matter if all your letters were intercepted through no fault of your own; no matter if you tried to make contact the moment you came back, only to learn that the girl was dead and the child you didn't know about had vanished without a trace; you are still a terrible person. Because you shouldn't have slept with her, should you? Not before you'd put a ring on her finger. I must say, supposedly moralistic Dickens cut Captain Hawdon in Bleak House much more slack than this.          

Anyway, I've now started reading a slim Swedish volume which seems to be evolving into an elegant chiller, set in a manor-house in an unspecified country during an unspecified war. I'm not greatly in favour of mysterious dystopias generally, but this story seems promising, and the author conjures up atmosphere without being boring. Perhaps I've struck gold at last - or at least first-rate electricity-conducting copper.

Upstairs Downstairs - The original

OK, back to costume dramas. As I've mentioned, I've started rewatching the original Upstairs Downstairs, one of the great costume-drama classics. As often with a classic TV drama, I was afraid it wouldn't quite live up to my expectations: after all, a lot has happened on the TV front since I saw it last, and programmes from the Seventies and Eighties now tend to seem a bit slow and talky. Upstairs Downstairs is still first-class viewing, though. Yes, it is talky at times, but the conversations are to the point and character-illuminating, not just jaw-jawing. Compared to some scenes in the first two episodes in The Forsyte Saga, which I have unwisely started watching in tandem (you should sandwich Upstairs Downstairs viewing with something modern and snappy, not another old series), the story-telling is well-structured, and you don't feel your inner editor commenting: "All right, cut that! You've already made that point. You can lift this scene right out and give us the information in an aside." (I mean, seriously, Forsyte - do we need to know the details about Mrs Heron's investments?)

Upstairs Downstairs is ground-breaking in many ways. One, it is an original story, not an adaptation of a novel. In costume-drama world, this is rare. Two, it shows a whole new way of telling the story of a well-to-do family (the Bellamys in this case), by bringing in the servants' point of view. Servants have played important parts in dramas before, of course, but I get the impression - though I confess I'm not an expert on the subject - that the double-perspective of masters and servants was something new and fresh at the time. In a story like The Forsyte Saga, servants are constantly glimpsed, but we can never guess what they really think about what's going on. How sanguine do James Forsyte's servants feel when they celebrate Winifred's marriage with food and drink provided for the occasion? What is Mrs Heron's maid's opinion of Soames, who always hangs up his coat himself - does she see it as a kindness, or does it make her feel small both figuratively and literally? Let alone do we get to know anything about the servants' own lives, loves, dreams and ambitions. Upstairs Downstairs shows that the downstairs view can not only be interesting in itself, but shed new light on what goes on upstairs. Far from becoming a dreary social-history lesson, this way of telling the story adds excitement and human interest, and helps middle-class neurotics like me to fight our uneasiness where servants are concerned. Yes, they are talking about you - but not necessarily in a nasty way.

Three, Upstairs Downstairs does something few dramas have the nerve to do (understandably as it's hard to pull off). It doesn't label its characters as good or bad. Each character has his or her flaws and failings, as well as his or her good parts, and the series asks you to accept them as they are and care what happens to them. It works and it gets you thinking. As an example, I remember how shocked I was when I rewatched the series the first time since girlhood and realised that Mr Hudson (the butler) and Mrs Bridges (the cook) - for whom I had cheerfully rooted first time round - were in many ways not particularly nice people. Mr Hudson's hidebound views have a stifling effect on the servants under him which the more good-natured Carson in Downton Abbey can only dream of, and Mrs Bridges is a terrible tyrant with her kitchen maids: somehow I was sorry that Ruby's bids for freedom never came off. Now I see the series again, I think I was being a bit too harsh on these two senior servants. Hudson's preaching about not gossiping about "our betters" may seem unfair when there are so few delights in a servant's life as it is; however, the episode "Magic Casements" shows that a household's happiness and survival might actually depend on the discretion of its staff. The scene at the end of that episode where Hudson mouths a silent "thank you" to the Heavens (at least, I think that's what he's doing) when he realises the Bellamys are reconciled is both human and touching, and I have seldom liked him more. As for Mrs Bridges, she cares for Ruby in her rough way, and who knows if Ruby - who, perhaps, is not quite as simple as the others take her for - may not have the last laugh.

As may have become apparent, Julian Fellowes owes quite a heavy debt to Upstairs Downstairs, which I'm sure he'd be the first to acknowledge. He's benefited from the servant-master perspective both in Gosford Park and in Downton Abbey, while going a little easier on the subtle characterisation part. Maybe as a homage to the great forerunner, he has borrowed one or two story lines from it, notably the "noble suitor of household's daughter who's really more into footmen"-plot (worth filching for the knuckle-smooching alone) and the "admirer of the cook turns out to be a skirt-chaser and only interested in her food"-plot. Also, there are a number of servant names that crop up both in Upstairs Downstairs and Downton. This may be because these were common names among servants - what do I know? - but I wonder. The Downton characters are always so wildly unlike their Upstairs Downstairs namesakes that I suspect Fellowes to have had some deliberate fun with the naming process. In Upstairs Downstairs, we have a determined and temperamental housemaid called Daisy, impervious to bullying or undue influence; a bubbly, pretty housemaid called Sarah who's quite unfit for service; a neurotic footman called Alfred, responsible for the knuckle-smooching mentioned above; and a cheeky-chappie Welsh footman/valet turned chauffeur called Thomas with an eye for the ladies and the main chance (though the main chance rarely has an eye for him). Rose (housemaid in Upstairs Downstairs, lady in Downton) and James (the Bellamys' son in Upstairs Downstairs, footman in Downton) have to be coincidences, though.

It is a little foolhardy of Fellowes to invite comparisons in this way: objectively speaking, Upstairs Downstairs is more ambitious script-wise and characterisation-wise than its successor. Nevertheless, Downton has a charm of its own, and for all its flaws need not be ashamed of itself even when compared with the best that costume drama has to offer. But then I'm rather biased in Downton's favour. This neither-good-nor-bad-character stunt showcased in Upstairs Downstairs has one hefty drawback - when it comes to recurring characters, the series is singularly short of villains.

Short Eurovision lowdown - plus scraping the Wilkie Collins barrel

I don't feel up to much Eurovision blogging this time round. I was planning to do a review of the semi-finals and the finals and award prizes like "love triangle of the year" (Azerbaijan - both the crooner and his girl seemed more interested in the dancer in the box than each other), "vampire of the year" (Romania's answer to Farinelli), "stylish V-lizard-inspired fashion statement of the year" (Norway), "bad loser of the year" (guess - I'm not talking about the singer here but about her country's endlessly charming press) etc. However, the party's over now and my enthusiasm for the subject has nearly faded away. But hey, wasn't it an amazing show? I don't care that our boy-singer didn't get a better result: he did a respectable job with a song I personally didn't like much, and we didn't make fools of ourselves. The contests were professionally organised and hosted, and if the humour was a little strained sometimes, it was still P.G. Wodehouse compared to normal Eurovision standards. At last, one of my new year wishes came true!

On the reading front, I have come through one of my impulse-bought family sagas, which turned out to be more of a Catherine Cookson-inspired, heroine-faces-up-to-grim-destiny-and-wins-through-up-north tale. It wasn't a disaster, but neither was it brilliant. I suspect Cooksonish stories are most enjoyable in TV form (but then they are very enjoyable). I needed a safe card after that, and so I picked a fairly early novel by Wilkie Collins, Hide and Seek.

I'm well read-up on Collins by now. I've read his most famous novels (The Woman in White, The Moonstone), the ones experts think should be more famous (Armadale, No Name), the almost-as-famous as the almost-famous ones (Man and Wife, Poor Miss Finch), novels generally considered to be also-rans (The Law and The Lady, The Dead Secret) and some of his shorter fiction, like No Thoroughfare which he co-wrote with Dickens. Enough bragging: the simple reason I keep returning to Collins is that he's such a good writer. Even a Collins also-ran is more interesting and more vivaciously written than many modern authors' best efforts. I have to say, however, that so far Hide and Seek is the weakest of the Collins novels I've read. I even liked The Moonstone more - which is saying something, as that book is a bit of a bug-bear of mine.

Collins's language is lively here as elsewhere: he knows how to freshen up descriptive and getting-from-A-to-B passages with flashes of humour, and he takes care of his secondary characters. The problem is, if Collins can do charming and engaging characters, he can also do very annoying ones. The main characters in Hide and Seek, if not as annoying as, say, Sir Patrick in Man and Wife or just about every protagonist in The Moonstone, are nevetheless on the irritating side. This may be because, for once in Collins, they are dangerously close to being stereotypes. The story of how the Philantropic Painter Valentine Blyth rescues the Beautiful Child Mary aka "Madonna" from a Dastardly Circus Owner reminded me of the melodrama acted by a group of itinerant players in the Lucky Luke adventure The White Knight (I'll probably return to this adventure at a later date, if ever I blog about what I call the "Lucky Luke audience syndrome" - confusing actors with the characters they play). It is such a basic and shamelessly button-pushing plot - good man, bad man, innocent child - as to be ridiculous. Back at home, the Philantropic Painter has a Bravely Long-Suffering Invalid Wife. The Beautiful Child grows up to be a Good and Beautiful Woman and, what do you know, she bears her fate with courage and good humour too (she's deaf and dumb as a result of a riding accident in the circus). She falls in love with a Good-hearted but Wayward Youth. Please, enough!

The other plot strand so far - how the strict upbringing of Mary's object of affection Zack has turned him wayward, in spite of himself - is even less interesting than the saccharine Blyth household. Strange how even plot-lines meaning to show that you shouldn't be too moralistic can stick in your craw if they're over-didactic. I saw from a glance at the Introduction that Hide and Seek is often compared to Dickens's Hard Times. I look forward to reading more about this once I've finished the book (you should never read an Introduction unless you already know what's going to happen in the novel). For all the surface differences - good circus owner versus bad circus owner, taking a circus girl away from the troop as a doubtful project versus taking her away as an unequivocal good thing (even if it means tearing her away from her foster mother), the perils of an over-scientific education versus the perils of an over-evangelical one - the two novels have a fault in common in my view. They are trying to prove their point or points at the expense of character complexity.

I'm not giving up yet, though - I have hopes that Hide and Seek will become more exciting in the second part of the book, the one called "Seeking". The opening chapter of this part is called "The Man with the Black Skull-Cap". Good. I like skull-caps.          

Non-costume-drama watching (yes, really!)

Now, I won't lie: I have not exactly been keeping back when it comes to costume dramas lately. I've rewatched the original Upstairs Downstairs (only the first series yet), the Andrew Davies adaptation of Sense and Sensibility  (not bad, but the film is better) and finally, unsurprisingly, Gosford Park (which had me humming "All kinds of everything remind me of you" for a whole day). But I'm not going to blog about them. Well, not yet, anyway. I couldn't do it without references to the D word, and my blog readers have deserved a break from everything landed-estate-in-Yorkshire-related. After all, there is more to TV life than costume dramas. Like... erm...

Well, like The Newsroom for instance. There are a lot of reasons why I should not like this new (well, fairly) series by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. One, the critics of the series are right: it does glamourise the journalist calling. The ideal journalist, in Aaron Sorkin's world, is a brave and incorruptible truth-seeker. Well, what do I know? There might be lots of journalists driven by their quest for truth. But I have formed the impression - and I don't think I'm being overly cynical here - that chasing a good story (which, of course, should also be true) is rather more important. And what's wrong with that? I think I would be able to understand a newsteam without having to think of them as the Knights of the Round Table.

Two, it is politically dishonest in a way The West Wing wasn't. The West Wing was set in the White House. The whole context was political. You expected the Democrat President and his staff to champion certain political views, and they did: that was, after all, what they were for. In contrast, the program which The Newsroom centres around claims to be about news, not a political agenda: it claims to give all sides a fair hearing and to give the viewers the information they need to make up their own mind. The news anchor Will McAvoy - to balance out the Democrat bias of his sassy (female) producer Mac - is supposed to be a card-carrying Republican. Well, he could have fooled me. Each and every news item so far (I'm about half-way through the series) has been slanted shamelessly in a Democrat direction. Opponents are not given a fair hearing (as they often were in The West Wing) - they are badgered. I may be the one being naïve now, but this is not how I imagine a news program should be like. Whatever happened to objectivity - couldn't they have a shot at it, at least?

What bugs me is not the politics in themselves - though I'm pretty sure President Obama himself would cover his eyes with embarrassment at some of McAvoy's manipulative tirades and mumble "not in my name" - but the lack of honesty. This news program is not unbiased, and its anchor is not Republican, so stop pretending otherwise.

In spite of these annoyances, though, I enjoy the series, largely because of its script. Sorkin has lost none of his snappiness since the early West Wing days. I find myself chuckling several times in front of each episode, even if it's one I don't care for much. The characters may not be quite such a charming bunch as the West Wing crew, but they're more likeable than the ones in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I'm won over by Emily Mortimer's MacKenzie McHale aka Mac - her English accent may have something to do with it - and the nicely self-deprecating economist Sloan (also a woman) is a character to root for, most of the time. Maggie does irritate me a bit - she should make up her mind on the man front. But the fact that I care at all has to be a good sign.                  

Desperately seeking family sagas

I'd like to think that the sudden craving for family sagas that inspired my Amazon shopping spree the other week isn't entirely down to Downton abstinence. After all, I've always had a soft spot for family sagas. Soames Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga was one of my first villain loves (as played by Eric Porter - sorry Damian Lewis, love the hair, but there can be only one...). Family sagas - set in historical times, naturally - offer endless opportunities when it comes to romantic entanglements, and my inner Emma Woodhouse delights in them.

Imagine my pleasure, then, when I found a whole category entitled "family sagas" on the co.uk version of Amazon. Once I was faced with this wealth of opportunities, though, a minimum of caution set in. It's been a while since Galsworthy's day, and family sagas are no longer considered quite the thing. That may not be such a bad thing - I wouldn't want anything too arty when looking for pure self-indulgence reads - but the challenge is to pick a novel that is frothy, entertaining and well-written.

While browsing, I came across many a die-hard plot formula. The World War Two Love Story seems unaccountably popular. What is it with the Brits and World War Two? What makes it an ideal back-drop for a hundred-and-one romances? It's a war, for pity's sake. It's grim at the front (as it tends to be in wars) and grim at home. Is this the draw, that the hardships on the home front make the heroine Suffer And Grow As A Person? Me, I like my sagas to have glamour, and not to be all clotted up with mud and debris. A bit of suffering never hurt a heroine, but preferably in picturesque surroundings, please.

While on the subject of mud, World War One is a pretty popular setting too, which is almost less comprehensible. While the British view of WWII remains rose-tinted for some reason (winning might have something to do with it), the Brits do get that WWI was horrible and not much else. And yet, and yet. I can't be the only one who secretely rolls her eyes as yet another scene in the trenches pops up in a British drama. Honestly, they all look the same. Whether on Doctor Who, Downton, Parade's End or even Horrible Histories: a trench is a trench is a trench. And as if these mud contests weren't tedious enough to sit through while they're on the screen: imagine reading about them. I know I sound callous, and I wouldn't quibble if we were talking about soul-searching explorations of human misery and man's beastliness to man. But these books, with glossy nurses and girls in uniform on the cover, are supposed to be light entertainment. As such, could they perhaps feature wars - if any - that are a little less recent and traumatic? The Crimean, say?

My main quarrel with the War Romances, though, is that I don't know why they're billed as family sagas. Didn't they forget the "family" bit? One bint who sighs for her RAF sweetheart or American bomber does not a family saga make, even if she does get a kid. This is what a family saga should be like: It should be set in historical times. It should feature a family on a landed estate, or at a pinch in a big townhouse. There should ideally be either a strong matriarch or a strong patriarch who is able to mess up his/her children's lives while trying to do what's best for them. There should be between two to five grown-up children. Poor cousins are most welcome to swell the ranks. Maybe there's a family feud with another clan. Throw in a bit of from-rags-to-riches-to-keeping-riches plotting, titled fortune-hunters, rich but unwanted suitors, hard-to-get heiresses, pretty maids with a tendency to get pregnant at the wrong moment - oh, and villains, of course. Voilà - that's what I call a real family saga. How hard can it be?

Harder than it looks, apparently. More than once, when I've given some "guilty pleasure" bestseller a try, I've come across what should have been a lip-smacking yarn told in flat and uninteresting prose. They've been written in what I call the "now read on" style: a prose style that reminds you of the action-packed summaries preceding the latest instalment of a serialised story in a women's magazine. It is as if some writers, knowing a fool-proof formula, think that they can rely on it to such an extent that they don't have to write it up at all. Consequently, I'm a little wary of novel titles that state the contents a bit too boldly, like Cockney Orphan, The Workhouse Girl or A Wartime Nurse. It's as if the scaffolding has not been removed properly, and if you get that feeling from the title, what will the rest of the story be like?

One could argue, I suppose, that good writers shun formulas in favour of deep, meaningful and original projects. But must that be the case? Regency romances have (or rather had) Georgette Heyer, among others: why should there not be similar "froth pros" writing family sagas? I mean to have a good look for a writer of popular fiction who realises one simple fact about much-loved plot formulas: You may have got the recipe, but you still have to cook the meal.