Pandora
Jilly Cooper Bantam Press, 558pp, £17.99
ISBN 0593046978
Some years ago, a friend of my mother's - let's call her Annie - moved to the country and started looking for Mr Right. After ups and downs a-plenty, she finally met someone who seemed just the ticket. He was bluffly unpretentious, reasonably good-looking, satisfactorily well off and, above all, kind. The only potential drawback for Annie, a woman of wide sexual experience, was that, as a rural lad who hadn't strayed far beyond the county boundary, he might be less than electric in bed. Consequently, she put off sleeping with him for as long as was indecently possible.
Came the hour, came the man - and in splendid style. Annie need not have feared. Her new beau, it turned out, could have made Casanova blush. When a delighted Annie remarked afterwards that he must have slept with a lot of women, Mr Right confessed with characteristic bluff unpretentiousness that it had been his first time, actually. But, he told Annie, he'd read a lot of Jilly Cooper.
Annie's man would love Pandora. What's more, he'd probably learn some new tricks. Being a near-septuagenarian has done nothing to dampen Jilly's interest in the erotic. On the contrary, being in her mid-sexties (as she might say herself) seems to have encouraged her to push back the boundaries further than before. Setting Pandora in the art world provides plenty of scope for lust of the kinky and verboten variety. Two pairs of brothers and sisters lust after each other, and at least one of the sisters believes the passion to have been consummated. A dark scene towards the end of the book has a woman being raped, with menstrual blood streaming down her legs. Very Jake and Dinos Chapman.
Cooperphiles should not worry, though. Pandora abounds with all the usual Jilly high jinks - handsome devils running around country houses with elephant's-trunk erections, and plump Sloanes being deflowered by brooding men they never realised fancied them. Plus other Cooper hallmarks such as aitch-dropping social climbers, men called Jupiter and Viridian, large golden labradors and larger golden-stone country houses. Cooper's dashing and enduring leitmotif Rupert Campbell-Black makes his inevitable - and welcome - appearance, along with the comically demanding diva Hermione Harefield from Score!
Cooper's other leitmotif - a rampant lack of political correctness - is also triumphantly in evidence. One character, with a blonde streak in her hair from chain-smoking, describes being in the SS as "just like being in the Guards", and is always picking bunches of cowslips. (Naughty Jilly! They're a protected species. Or is that the point?) There are cracks at Tony Blair; characters with social consciences (Green Jean) are portrayed as either dull or mad, and the most appealing are pro-hunting, anti-euro and of the opinion that the wildly handsome, arrogant and politically inclined Jupiter is what the Tory party needs to drag it out of the doldrums.
To the plot, then. Pandora, which takes its name from a fictional Raphael painting, revolves around two generations of the glamorous, reckless, impossibly handsome and sexually irrepressible Belvedon family (a sort of Foreskin Saga). Art dealer Raymond, owner of the Raphael, marries wild Czech painter Galena, who then shags everything in sight and has several equally beautiful, talented and tempestuous children before committing suicide. Enter pint-sized social climber Anthea, who marries Raymond and alienates his children, but that doesn't matter, because they either fancy each other rotten or are absorbed in their own darkly brilliant painting (or both). Things get even stickier when Anthea's own illegitimate child, Emerald, turns up, along with a vengeful Jew called Zac who is determined to wrest back the Raphael from Raymond, resulting in a court case, DNA tests . . . you get the picture (ho, ho). One doesn't read national institution Cooper for her plots, anyway. One reads her for her joie de vivre, her maudlin romanticism, her love of arty references and her razor-sharp sense of humour. Oh, and the sex.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
