FICTION:
Thanks for
the Memories, By Cecelia Ahern, HarperCollins, 373pp,
£12.99
CECELIA AHERN is queen of
the modern fairytale. She has not only cornered a market in magic,
she created it.
Thanks for the Memories,
her fifth novel, is long-awaited, not only by her millions of fans,
but by the book trade, because the one non-fairytale fact about
Ahern's novels is: they sell, writes
Denise Deegan.
The minute I knew she had a new book coming, the first thing I wanted to find out was the idea propelling its story. Because Ahern's ideas are good, which is why her novels translate so easily to film. Many a writer has regretted not coming up with an Ahern idea first. I know one who regrets having had a similar idea, but not the faith it took to write fairytale in a full-scale novel.
The concept behind Thanks for the Memories is this: two people magically linked by a blood transfusion. Justin Hitchcock (46), a divorced American professor of art and architectural history, visiting Dublin for a series of lectures, donates blood.
This is no selfless act of humanity, but a way of getting closer to an attractive doctor from the Irish Blood Transfusion Service who has come to the university in search of donors. Justin's donation is the "first thing to come from his heart in a long time" and while providing it, he has an opportunistic peek at the doctor's cleavage.
One month later, Joyce Conway (33) loses a lot of blood, and a baby - and, shortly after, the husband who didn't bother to return from Japan to be with her during the miscarriage of a child they'd hoped might save their marriage.
Joyce has lost so much. But she has also gained the inexplicible, and I mean the inexplicable, a sudden and in-depth knowledge of art and architecture, a craving for steak, though a vegetarian, and a host of memories from someone else's life.
And then they meet. Justin and Joyce. On her way home from hospital with her father, Joyce gets a sudden urge to get her hair cut. At exactly the same time, Justin stops his taxi at the same salon, for the same reason. The moment they see each other, they know there is a connection between them. They just don't know what it is. Hair cut, severely in Joyce's case, they go their separate ways. Subsequently, their lives keep interconnecting. They are drawn to each other. Something, though, always gets in the way.
Ahern knows her readers. She knows they don't want to dwell on Joyce's losses (a baby and a husband) which would, in real life overwhelm. And so she pulls them forward into a story of two people trying to connect, not quite knowing why. They get closer, then farther apart; closer, farther apart again. While Justin thinks it's a male/female chemistry thing Joyce is more intuitive.
Offering light entertainment along the way is Joyce's father, who provides a home and his love while Joyce gets her life sorted. Henry is a bit of a sweetie, who can't smoke in front of the photograph of his dead wife because he promised her he'd quit. He has never been out of the country and when Joyce drags him to London in search of Justin, he has a particularly tricky time at airport security when he thinks he's seen the last of his belt, shoes and cap. Ahern can write funny.
In Thanks for the Memories, Ahern has given her readers exactly what they want: love, magic, happy endings. And most of all, hope.
Denise Deegan is the author of four bestselling novels. Her latest, Do You Want What I Want?, will be published in paperback by Penguin Ireland in June