Book review: Our Precious Lulu

Published on Friday 29 May 2009 13:58

Our Precious Lulu by Anne Fine Bantam Press, 255pp, £16.99

THIS IS CREDIT-CRUNCH FICTION: light on ingredients, high on impact, comprised of seven parts EastEnders to two parts Corrie – to which add the merest dash of Neighbours. What results is Anne Fine's eighth novel, Our Precious Lulu, reeking of vitriol and farce, with a soap-operatic je ne sais quoi.

Its heroine, Geraldine, is virtually squeaky-clean; its twisted villainess, the eponymous stepsister Lulu, plays the book's goad from beginning to end. To take a pantomime analogy, the put-upon, skivvying Geraldine is Cinders, while Lulu, conniving, nasty and bitchy enough to be both of the ugly sisters rolled into one, is the novel's consistent moral nadir. Oh – and she's beautiful rather than ugly – perfect figure, legs to die for – a sparkling twist.

Good sister Geraldine, the lead role, stomps on to page one, exclaiming to Robert, her patient husband: "Guess what she's done now. Guess! Just guess …The bloody bitch!" It's a suitably melodramatic entrance for a character due to be vigorously miffed, irked and embittered, not to say jealous, for the next 250 rancorous pages. Poor Robert, inured to Geraldine's rants – and despite the fact that he's engrossed in a TV football game – tells her to "sit there and blow your stack quietly", while he fetches her an alcoholic soother.

He's not the stereotypical worm, or the hen-pecked husband – you've guessed it: he's Buttons, the stealthy catalyst, in a novel that's short on plot, with only five characters to speak of and a storyline that's more magazine short story than layered literary fiction.

The novel's so-called "bloody bitch" has seemingly gone and "got herself pregnant". The fact that Geraldine and Robert, after exploratory tests, and repeated attempts, have failed to conceive, is of course the reason that Lulu's success is such a difficult pill to swallow. Furthermore she hadn't apparently been trying, added to which her partner Harvey is an already twice-married man, already a father.

But, while the pregnancy rankles deeply, it is only the latest wrong in a lifetime of hurts. For Our Precious Lulu is a comedy of martyrdom and carping, a tale of two "sisters" as viewed by one, in which Jane, the mother-in-the-middle, stands accused of favouring Lulu. Much of the novel's opening segment provides the back story of the girls' childhoods, of Lulu's moving between her father's and stepmother's lives until her father dies in an accident.

Despite her stream of ire, Geraldine rationalises her mother's and Lulu's motives, while Robert tends to see more dispassionately the manipulative actions of his in-laws, laying traps to lay bare their motives and machinations. His ambition (which forms a sub-plot) is to emigrate with Geraldine to Australia and thereby escape "this family game of Psychic Tag".

The game rolls relentlessly for 150 pages, its peaks of emotion flattening out like a fatal heart attack graph, the narrative having screamed itself into submission.

Almost too late Fine resuscitates things by introducing Linda, Harvey's wife (about to be "ex"), who bumps into Robert (the pair of them never having met before) while shopping. She somehow lets slip that a) her divorce has just come through and, b) that she knows about Harvey's girlfriend – not Lulu at all, as it turns out, but a woman in Chester called Anna-Marie. Is Harvey cheating on Lulu as well?

Only a writer of Fine's accomplishment could persuade you to swallow Robert and Linda's accidental meeting and exchange (repeated again towards the end of the book). There seems no prospect of resolution to Geraldine's dithering or moaning, no end to Lulu's cadging and preening, nor Harvey's duplicity, or the mother's sly manoeuvrings.

It is this that forces the tale towards its endgame, jolting Geraldine into action. The question is not: "Is the outcome believable?" But rather "Does anything matter?" Apart from Linda, Harvey's "ex", it is hard to empathise with the stream of whingeing and posturing laid before us. Even Puffer, Robert and Geraldine's family cat behaves with cavalier disregard for everyone else, and so, when Fine lets in some light at the novel's end to reveal a blue sky, it is hard to care.