Robert (introverted thirty-something art restorer) gives evening lectures in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he meets Angela (pale twenty-something with a heart-shaped face, short hair, no make-up and shoes with buckles).
Naturally any convent girl would spot the signs immediately (especially the buckles) but in these modern days of a post-habit-wearing sisterhood, how is a guy to know? And so the hapless Robert must endure the ensuing stream of laborious cross-purposes and tedious tales of Angela's mountainy family back in Ireland before the truth of his beloved's religious status emerges, by which time she is ready to renounce the nunnery and end with a bang rather than a wimple. Few writers would have the energy to spin out such a thin premise over 300 pages, but O'Riordan proceeds with brio, doubtless encouraged by the proven formula of nuns-in-love on page and screen. Her heroine is no Deborah Kerr, however, and even Julie Andrews only just got by on the strength of some good songs.
By contrast, Angela is an unforgiveably irksome contrivance. Perhaps she is intended to appeal as a winsome, waifish naif, adrift in a London of "perverts and pagans", but she simply comes across as slow. Throughout the book she is either crippled with embarrassment at her own desperately unfunny predicaments or convulsed with pity for every tramp and prostitute who darkens the door of the inner-city hostel where she ministers to the unfortunate, in the company of the brutish Mother Mary Margaret (swears, drinks gin) and Sister Carmel (hands out holy pictures and bonbons). For a brief moment things look more promising when she is set upon by a psychopath, but alas, plot necessity intervenes and Angela escapes to blush again.
The current publishing deluge of slick city-girl novels and snappy, light romance has created a sophisticated readership for this kind of material; one that knows the difference between irony and bathos. How will O'Riordan's book fare in such a climate? The humour is fatigued, the narrative grinding, and I would go so far as to suggest that some of the caricatures might be described as misogynistic were they not protected by the conventions of the "non-serious" genre. But fans of her previous novels, Involved and The Boy in the Moon, might want to make the effort. And trust me, it is an effort.
Eve Patten lectures in English at Trinity College, Dublin