FICTION: ANNA CAREYreviews Comfort and Joyby India Knight Penguin Fig Tree, 230pp. £14.99
CHRISTMAS may officially be a season of peace and goodwill, but it's also a time of frazzled nerves, family tension and heightened emotions. Which makes it the perfect setting for a novel about the complexities of family life. Comfort and Joy, the welcome return to fiction of the newspaper columnist India Knight, after several books on subjects that included diets and thrifty living, follows its likeable heroine, Clara Dunphy, over three Christmases.
When the story begins, just before Christmas Eve 2009, Clara – last seen in Knight's 2000 debut novel, My Life on a Plate– is getting ready to host a huge celebration that will include everyone from her ex-husband and her current mother-in-law to her best friend's much older boyfriend. Christmas is hugely important to Clara, not least because it reminds her of one of the most stable periods of her life, when her glamorous and charismatic mother, Kate, was married to a kindly man called Julian and Clara enjoyed a happy childhood with her two younger half-sisters, Evie and Flo.
Now, every year, she makes a huge effort to ensure that Christmas is “nice. Warm. Loving. Joyous”. Although her own family life hasn’t followed a traditional path, Christmas is, in theory at least, a time for everyone to celebrate the fact that they care about each other: “It’s like the fairy tales in the window: for families, every Christmas is a new opportunity for Happy Ever After.” But over the course of a single festive evening, cracks start to appear in Clara’s marriage to her Irish husband, Sam, and when the action jumps to Christmas 2010 the reader discovers that Clara’s life, never simple, has become even more complicated.
Knight is, as ever, extremely funny – if slightly too prone to making jokes about genitalia – but what raises her work above the mass of throwaway light fiction is the fact that, amid the jokes, she writes about love – of parents, of partners, of children, of friends – with great insight and honesty and without sentimentality.
As Clara tries to figure out what she needs from a happy relationship, and starts to realise that her seemingly comfortable if undramatic marriage to Sam may be unravelling, her anger, confusion, exasperation and pain ring utterly true – as does her sometimes dark humour and, ultimately, her optimism.
Not all the characters are always quite as convincing – the portrayal of Clara’s working-class Irish mother-in-law, Pat, while often very funny and at times a spot-on depiction of the martyred Irish mammy, sometimes descends into a lazy stereotype. (There’s a rather distasteful moment when an understandably frustrated Clara goes on a long internal diatribe in which she says that in Pat’s personal world there’s “no self-examination, no questioning”, and it all suggests that finer feeling and complex analysis are the province of the pesto-making middle classes, not the white-bread-eating, simple-minded proles.)
But for the most part this is a deceptively thoughtful and compassionate book, and one that refuses to offer tidy solutions to life’s emotional dramas. Everything isn’t wrapped up neatly at the end of the novel, but it still feels like a satisfying ending.
And Clara’s extended clan, including not just one but two ex-husbands and two ex-mothers-in-law, may seem unconventional, but this is a family that works, not just because its members love each other but because they have made an effort to remember that. Which is, surely, what Christmas is all about.
Anna Carey is a freelance journalist. Her first novel for young adults, The Real Rebecca, will be published by the O'Brien Press in February
