Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination Helen Fielding Picador, 344pp, £12.99 ISBN 0330432737

In her opening acknowledgements, Helen Fielding's thanks go "above all to Kevin Curran for his enormous contribution in terms of plotting, character, jokes, ideas". I don't know who this guy is, but I'd be happy to represent him on a no-win, no-fee basis if he wants to sue her for defamation. The chatty, chick-lit tone with which this author is so comfortable sits crazily ill at ease with the spy genre. Olivia Joules, Bridget Jones's much-vaunted polar opposite, is in fact Bridget Jones without the weight problem. The other characters are two-dimensional goodies or baddies, with the exception of the best friend, who is called Kate but is actually Shazza.

Fielding clearly aimed to create a whole new global brand of female protagonist. She was to be competent, ballsy, tenacious, self-sufficient, beautiful and bold, with a mind like a mantrap. How to create such a creature, when everyone knows that women are actually useless baggages? Enter the first episode of vacuous death - Olivia's parents are killed in a road accident, a tragedy that turns her natural femininity on its head. "Over time, she had painstakingly erased all womanly urges to question her shape, looks, role in life, or effect upon other people. She would watch, analyse and conform to codes as she observed them, without allowing them to affect or compromise her own identity." All well and good, except that this heroine is constantly nattering on about her shape, her role, the impressions she has made, the chocolates she should not have eaten and the men she should not have snogged. She has no independence of spirit whatsoever. There is such a clumsy disjunction between her nature as she is described, and her nature as manifested by her speech and action, that it is as if each new sentence were written by a different person, in the manner of a parlour game.

Death Mark II occurs early on, when al-Qaeda blows up a cruise ship and Olivia swims back and forth, rescuing people. This is illustrated with a cartoon, presumably by way of clarification for those who cannot yet read. We are clearly dealing with a woman of great bravery. She is also a very talented linguist, fine diver and sea analyst, a problem-solver, thinker and player. This is stretching it a bit, since all that's ever going on in her head is "food, food, pretty slip dress, Marc Jacobs, ooh, she's pretty, is she prettier than me?, food, mmm, what a hunk, Prada". The author clearly feels very liberated by her naturally slim character, and so we are treated to fresh snack porn with the dawn of every new day. A fast metabolism is a gift from God - but dedication to the study of languages and seascapes takes at least natural curiosity, in aspects of life beyond what you look like and what you will and will not put in your mouth. Olivia shows absolutely no sign of such an interior life, leaving the reader to wonder, well, how did she come to learn Arabic? Has she been recently lobotomised? Isn't that the kind of information we should be told?

The coarse political undertow, as Olivia attempts to infiltrate the upper echelons of al-Qaeda using her great beauty and charming ineptitude, will offend most readers at some point. The sensitive will baulk at the very premise; our filly thinks she's found Osama: "Oops, some people are dead, it must be him, I can't find his pseudonym on Google, oops, I spelt it wrong, mmm, he may be a mass-murderer but he's so dreamy, oops some more people are dead." Sterner souls will turn at the line "Oh no, oh no, they're taking me away to be stoned!" as the terrorist kidnaps the heroine, except - phew! - just to feed her dinner, not to stone her at all.

The queasiest passage is when Suraya, a double-crossing beauty whom Olivia hates (not because she's beautiful, silly; because she's not a girl's girl) is found out, and our heroine muses prettily about hoping she ends up in an orange jumpsuit in Cuba. Hang on - she's talking about Guantanamo Bay. Olivia has upped the stakes in some facile, cod-feminist squabble, to extend to deportation for the mean lady to the site of the greatest, most visible human rights abuse in the western world.

There are other faults - a narrative style that reads like Harry Potter, snogging scenes that are sub-Judy Blume, and woefully bad pacing, in which disasters never quite get off the ground before they are averted. But above all, this book takes painfully serious acts of oppression and slaughter and treats them with endless, baffling flippancy.

Zoe Williams is a columnist on the Guardian

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website