With a sassy cartoon sketch on the cover and a sparkly blurb about a woman who can't stop getting married, Reader, I Married Him is packaged as chick lit. Because it is by Michele Roberts, however, it amounts to more than a respected author's bid for a larger share of the popular pound - she couldn't write a bad sentence no matter how hard she tried. The title, that famous tag from Jane Eyre, tells us that this is a jeu d'esprit aimed at the highly literate female whose other books are Penguin Classics. It is exquisitely elegant and often very amusing. Think of John Lanchester and Thomas Harris in a threesome with Muriel Spark. There are no chicks here, thank God - only knowing old hens with talons of steel.
Aurora, the narrator, runs a delicatessen in north London. She has been married, and widowed, three times. She is now 50 and in search of an identity. "With Tom I'd been a hippie who smoked dope, listened to David Bowie, threw the I Ching," she says. "With Cecil I'd been an elegant and gracious hostess giving art historical dinner parties. With Hugh I'd been a walker, camper, devotee of folk songs and real ale. But now? Alone, I could be anything."
Maude, Aurora's painted crone of a stepmother, lectures her for being too "romantic and dreamy". Maude's claustrophobic flat is stuffed with knick-knacks. She lives for Catholicism, dressing up and ballroom dancing. She is trying to persuade Aurora to widen her horizons by joining the parish pilgrimage to Rome. "I can add an extra panel to my black cocktail frock," she muses happily. "And I can take a bunch of rosaries for His Holiness to bless. That's my Christmas present problem solved for this year."
Aurora is not tempted by the prospect of travelling with the parish priest, Father Kenneth, who can never remember her name (a recurring joke that rather out-stays its welcome). She is, however, intrigued by a new collar on the block, a certain Father Michael, who is passionate about Jung, strangely well-shod and disturbingly sexy. "I felt like Dorothea in Middlemarch," says Aurora, "when, after her dreary courtship by Casaubon, Will Ladislaw suddenly comes into her life."
This is a heroine who constantly iden-tifies herself with fictional characters: Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, Harriet Vane in Dorothy L Sayers's Have His Carcase. She relates her own history as a series of literary anecdotes, with a detachment that gradually chills. For Aurora is no ordinary, invisible fiftyish lady. Her dowdy black clothes cover a raging appetite for sex, food, drink - the whole garden of earthly delights. She is, we discover, poised to reinvent herself once more.
Deciding that Italy would be an ideal place for regeneration, Aurora announces that she is going on a retreat with her best friend, Leonora. In her fiery youth, Leonora was a revolutionary feminist. She is now Sister Leonora Mason of the Brigandines of Padenza. And it all begins to look distinctly strange when we learn that Leonora has asked her old friend to bring her a gun. It travels through customs hidden in a packet of sanitary towels, alongside a canister apparently containing the ashes of Aurora's last husband.
The convent is as comfortable as a lux-ury hotel, and the nuns, most unusually, seem to answer to no one but themselves. Leonora explains that she can put her friend up for only one night, because she is hosting an important conference. So Aurora calls upon an old acquaintance of her second husband, who lends her a nice little flat in his museum. And after a few idyllic days of sexy shopping, orgasmic eating and smoking the dope she has smuggled into Italy underneath the ashes, she is surprised when the enigmatic Father Michael reappears. He is presenting a paper at Leonora's conference - but is that the whole story?
Not at all. By now, the reader should be wondering about all sorts of things, such as what exactly happened to all those husbands of Aurora's. The last chapter, a brisk tying-up of ends, is clunky and too hastily tacked on. But everything else is delightfully subtle, ironic, gorgeously written and glorious fun to read.
Kate Saunders's Bachelor Boys is published in paperback by Arrow
