Working Wonders (by Jenny Colgan)

(Amazon UK link)

On the whole, I have liked the books I’ve read by Jenny Colgan. They’re light women’s fiction, often based around some kind of food shop or other small village establishment. So when I saw ‘Working Wonders’ at a church book sale towards the end of last year, I picked it up. It’s been on my to-be-read shelf until I picked it up to read a few days ago.

It starts well enough. Arthur and his girlfriend Fay are getting up, and clearly not getting along very well. They don’t seem to communicate, and Arthur’s beginning to feel as if they’re an old married couple with little spark in their lives.

Arthur works in a rather depressing office in Coventry, with some caricatured colleagues: there’s Sven, who is Scandinavian, large and smelly, who takes his even smellier dog Sandwiches to work with him. There’s Marcus, who’s an accountant, and there’s Cathy, who isn’t particularly happy at home, but tries really hard to please everyone in the office. None of them is really three-dimensional and we mostly see them from Arthur’s rather cynical viewpoint.

On this particular day, everyone has to re-apply for their own jobs. Arthur finds this very frustrating and becomes quite violent. But - and I didn’t entirely understand how this happens - he ends up in charge of a group of people, overseeing a project to turn Coventry into a European city of culture. The book was published in 2003, and I’ve no idea if something of that nature happened - but it’s a work of fiction. That’s okay.

One of the problems with this book is that alongside the story - with its exaggerated suggestions and gradual bonding of the team - is a somewhat surreal, almost fantasy element that doesn’t really fit. After Arthur’s violent incident he wakes up in an office he’s never seen before, with a bohemian looking woman called Lynne, who tells him she’s the company psychotherapist. She then randomly appears to Arthur, and at one point tells him he’s descended from the legendary King Arthur, and has a mission. But very little is made of this and no explanation is offered.

There’s a lot of crude and other bad language in the book, far more than feels either appropriate or relevant. I’ve never met anyone who speaks that way. I know a lot of books include ‘strong’ language, and occasionally, in a dramatic context, it isn’t a problem. But almost every page in this book is peppered with it.

Then there’s a chapter set in Denmark, in snowy wastes, with a sleigh being seen as the normal mode of transport. My geography knowledge isn’t great, so I checked - and Denmark doesn’t actually have much snow at all.

The blurb on the back calls this a ‘delicious comedy’, which suggests that the person writing it had not read the book. I didn’t find anything delicious or amusing in the book - Arthur is likeable enough, but mostly either worried or depressed, or wondering how to speak to women. We never discover quite why he’s so unwilling to talk about his feelings - the blurb implies that there’s something in his past that is discovered, but unless I missed it somewhere, there’s nothing of that nature.

And while I might have just shrugged and put the book away after finishing if it had continued in the same kind of vein, I found the climax to the book extremely disturbing - partly because there was no hint that something terrible would happen. Not that I was emotionally affected, as I hadn’t developed any kind of affinity for any of the characters, but it felt quite wrong in context. I don’t see the point of it from a fiction point of view - and while a big deal was made of Arthur having to make a ‘right choice’, it appears at the end that he’s worse off than he was at the start of the book.

On the plus side, I did keep reading - I was interested to know where the story was going, although by the end I rather wished I hadn't. It's not a difficult read and the pace is good. I won’t be reading this again, and really wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but it won't put me off trying other Jenny Colgan books in future.

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