I’m sure this won’t stop someone snapping this up for a three episode mini-series, but the appeal there, will be, to my mind, the book’s greatest weakness. The main problem is that the characters and their dilemmas are so crashingly dull and unbelievable. If that is meant to be enough, we’re setting the bar extremely low.Īnd that’s really all the good stuff. As an experienced journalist you would expect no less, but not wanting to be churlish, she is more than competent at structuring the narrative and balancing dialogue and description, but then so are many Sixth formers.
Some of the observations about relationships and family dynamics are acute and amusing, and Mason can clearly write. On a couple of occasions, I laughed out loud, and that is not something you can fake. Well, let’s deal with the good stuff first.
And we don’t want that sort of thing to catch on, do we? But then Rooney’s last book did brilliantly and convincingly portray working class characters that were recognisably human.
Maybe Rooney comes at too high price these days to be even mentioned in publicity puffs, who knows. Maybe there are contractual barriers to that, but I’m sure the publishers would have been falling over themselves, to get that agreement over the line. The only thing missing are references to Sally Rooney, the media’s favourite young darling. Waller Bridge is a gloriously talented writer and Fleabag is funny, refreshing and moving – everything that Sorrow and Bliss isn’t but wants so desperately to be. That’s like comparing The Tempest to Love Island because it’s got people in it and it’s set on an island. A comparison with Fleabag is also heavily underlined. There are two large quotes highlighted on the front cover, one from Ann Patchett and the other from Jessie Burton – both female writers surfing a certain zeitgeist at the moment. The quotes on the inside cover are all from famous women, apart from a couple that are just attributed to a publication. It’s targeted at women readers so single-mindedly that it might as well have a pink cover. Many of these books represent a triumph of marketing over substance and I’m afraid Sorrow and Bliss is another that disappoints. But there’s more than sour grapes to this less than enthusiastic review. And, of course, I wouldn’t be complaining if one of my books was at the centre of such a fabricated whirlwind of interest. Then you get tweets and Instagram posts from influencers saying how wonderful it was, to which in their turn, in the time -honoured, strange, traditions of twitter, followers gush back, agreeing how amazing it was and the churn of interest continues. Sorrow and Bliss is one of those much-touted novels that seem to gain traction in the Spring so that many people select them as one of their Summer holiday reads.
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