I had not heard of Harriet Evans, but when browsing used books at a church book sale, a few months ago, I spotted her novel ‘Happily Ever After’. The cover looked quite appealing, and the blurb on the back described the book as ‘absorbing, poignant and unforgettable’. I never mind spending fifty cents to try a new author, so I bought it, and have just finished reading it.
The protagonist of this novel is a young woman called Eleanor Bee, known to her family as ‘Ellie’, but she prefers ‘Elle’. She loves books and has always wanted to work in a publishing house. Unfortunately she’s not good at interviews, and seems destined never to get a job. She’s sleeping on the floor of a friend’s flat, and she’s beginning to feel awkward - when serendipity strikes, and she not only has a good interview, but is offered a job.
So far so good, and the story essentially charts Elle’s progress from a young, gauche and nervous person through to a smartly dressed, focussed, quick-thinking and highly talented editor. The scenes set in various offices feel believable, and if her boss Felicity is a tad caricatured, it doesn’t much matter. Elle’s colleagues feel a bit two-dimensional, and I had a hard time remembering who was whom, but that’s not a problem either.
On the other hand, we never quite discover why Elle is promoted so readily, as the action leaps ahead a few years every so often. That's a good device in novels where not much happens in those years, other than characters growing older. But in this novel, most of the action in Elle's work life seems to take place in intervening years and we never entirely discover how or why.
The poignancy in the book revolves around Elle’s family life. There’s a prologue, set ten years before the story starts, that sees her as a teenager on holiday with her parents and brother, shortly after the death of her grandfather. There are a lot of tensions; Elle fights with them all, and sees her mother drinking rather more than is healthy. This holiday, as we learn later in the book, was the beginning of the end; by the time we see Elle again in Chapter One, her parents are divorced, and her father remarried.
There are subsequent scenes involving Elle’s family: her brother gets engaged to an American girl who’s quite a perfectionist, and the interactions between them all are shown well. There is a lot that’s thought-provoking as the past unfolds in conversations and memories, and Elle begins to understand and forgive.
However, there are also a lot of threads about what might euphemistically be called Elle’s love life. She isn’t particularly good with men, but still seems to have had a lot of different partners and experiences. Perhaps this is typical in certain circles, but it’s so far removed from my experienced, or that of anyone I know, that I found it rather sordid.
The author doesn’t make the mistake of showing us what goes on in the bedroom; indeed she makes sure that part of Elle’s editing process is to cut steamy sex scenes from some of the novels being published. But she does make references to rather a lot of intimate encounters, and at times shows us the immediate aftermath, in a way that is extremely unappealing.
The writing is good, and the pace makes for a very readable book, but I never really empathised with Elle; she seems such a mixture of different personalities that she’s not entirely believable. Or maybe she’s just so different from anyone I’ve ever met that I had a hard time seeing anything much from her perspective.
Still, I did appreciate several literary references, and was particularly pleased that the author makes quite a big thing about Elle reading Georgette Heyer, who is my favourite historical novelist. But that made it rather ironic that while Elle hankers after a Heyer-like happy ending, her own lifestyle is nothing like that of any of Heyer’s heroines.
If you like light women’s fiction with some difficult issues covered, and don’t mind the promiscuity and excessive use of bad language, it’s not a bad book. But it’s not one I plan to read again, and I won’t be looking for anything else by this author.
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