The Man with the Dancing Eyes
Sophie Dahl Bloomsbury, 75pp, £9.99
ISBN 0747563721
As any model worth her Marlboro Lights knows, a pretty face and a great body are no longer enough: you need to become an ambassador or found a new school of yoga to be taken seriously these days. Not only does Sophie Dahl have genes that gave her Bambi eyes and peaches-and-cream skin, she also comes from a fine literary pedigree. Gorgeous, young and famous, Sophie is a publisher's fantasy (never mind that Opium ad). And who better to publish her fairy story for grown-ups than Pottersbury? More of a billet-doux than a novel (your tax return is longer and more demanding), The Man with the Dancing Eyes, illustrated by her childhood friend Annie Morris (in a latter-day version of the Dahl-and-Blake collaboration), is as slim and delectable as Sophie herself.
Conceived "amidst the linen sheets of the Pierre Hotel", Pierre was "the result of an unlikely liaison between a bumbling botanist and a ravishing yet distant soprano". Our heroine meets the man with the dancing eyes, a long-limbed painter, at a party. They embark on a glorious affair. He showers her with sweet peas, reads T S Eliot to her in the bath, and serenades her to sleep with songs by Bob Dylan. She is his muse. "'I'm mad about you,' he proclaimed. 'Lucky, lucky me,' she said." Lucky girl, indeed.
But such happiness is not to last. Before summer is over, he commits an "indiscretion that tore her in two". Oops. So, like any self-respecting girl in a fix, Pierre moves to New York, shacks up with Blue, a chain-smoking spinster (whose enormous breasts are bizarrely always on show), acquires a dog called Froggy (pink) and a GBF (gay best friend), Hubert the hairdresser. Naturally, it all ends happily ever after.
Stuffed with posh English eccentrici- ties and more fashionable names than a glossy magazine, this tiny book resembles a cross between an old maid's attic and an It-girl's wardrobe. A weakness for Guinness or lapsang souchong is the closest Sophie comes to fleshing out her characters. Indeed, her last square meal seems to have been the Dictionary of Cliches ("a whisper of a smile", "waltzed off into the night", "sing from the rooftops"). She does have a nice line in alliteration, though.
A recent interview with the adorable author describes the novel as "part Eloise, part Love in a Cold Climate, part Edith Sitwell and part any one of her grandfather Roald Dahl's books". Well, yes, and I'm part Kate Moss and part Claudia Schiffer. Reviews have praised Annie Morris's colourful, quirky illustrations - which appear alongside a photograph of the delightful Ms Dahl (as if we haven't seen enough of her already). As a showcase for Morris's work, this is a charming, whimsical offering, as pretty and pointless as a sugar love heart.
As Angela Carter, A S Byatt and Marina Warner have shown, adult fairy tales should be alluringly mysterious and ambi-guous. OK, so we shouldn't take things too seriously, but this, dahling, is neither. Where Sophie Dahl was once a masterpiece of volupte, her skinny first novel, released just in time for Valentine's Day, is a cynical exercise in celebrity publishing. I suspect it will be the girls buying The Man with the Dancing Eyes for the men in their lives, rather than the other way round. But to any romantic chap who is tempted by this party-invitation-sized present: read her T S Eliot in the bath instead.
Lisa Allardice is arts editor of the New Statesman
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