Angel
Katie Price Arrow Books, 432pp, £6.99
ISBN 0099497867
Katie Price, the pneumatic glamour model otherwise known as Jordan, has written a novel called Angel, a rags-to-bitches tale about - yes! - a pneumatic glamour model. The jacket photograph shows Price lying naked with her legs in the air, toying with some pearls. "From Britain's No 1 celebrity comes a sexy and irresistible novel to follow her smash hit biographies and launch her as a major new name in women's fiction," the press release gibbers, before announcing that Price will be publicising Angel by wandering around London in a pair of wings.
The novel opens in the bedroom of Angel's best friend, Gemma, who is worried about Angel's mono-brow and dowdy dress sense - things that amount to self-harm in Price's world. Gemma plucks at Angel's face with tweezers and squeezes her into a push-up bra. And, wow, a star is born! (Price is addicted to exclamation marks, as she is to clichés.) "You look like a model," says Gemma as Angel pouts in disbelief. I flick across to Price's autobiography, Being Jordan, in which she charts her life from birth to 2004. Here, by contrast, there is no uncertainty as to her destiny. "I'd always wanted to be a model," Price writes. "Either that or a pop star - or both! I love showing off. Let's face it: I was never going to be a brain surgeon."
Angel is in love with her brother's best friend Cal (I think it is short for calorie), a "drop-dead gorgeous, well-fit" footballer who "she wants so badly it hurts". But Calorie loves "überbitch" Melanie. With a thrilling lapse of self-awareness, Price describes Melanie as "a footballer's wife in the making, with her fake tan, fake nails and designer clothes". Hurt by Cal's indifference, Angel heads for the bright lights of the big city, where she becomes a glamour model.
At this point in her character development, Angel seems permanently surprised - is it the eyebrow plucking, or something darker? "She had never seen so many pairs of breasts all at once", and she worries that her breasts are too small ("she couldn't help comparing her 32B breasts with the 32DDs around her"). Once the kit is off, however, it's game over. "You've got real star quality, Angel," says Richard the photographer. And Angel is launched on to the F- list celebrity merry-go-round, a cruel world of Slippery Nipple cocktails, jealous page-three girls and boy-band baddies.
It is a land of glittering pathos. While part of her enjoys the perks of being able to jump the queue in nightclubs, the other, "more sensitive" side can't help feeling "slightly guilty for her good fortune". This is Angel being Angelic, a naked conductor for the grief of the world - "she could remember what it felt like to queue in the pouring rain". Reading the rest of Price's oeuvre makes me realise that Angel is sweeter than her creator, less vulgar, less brutal, less tough. Surely to sanitise Price is to miss the point of her? She isn't a tart with a heart: she's a tart with nails.
The real Price is particularly unkind about her boyfriends. "The only thing I didn't like about Gary's body was the wart he had on his balls," she says of one admirer, before describing a catastrophic sex session with the Pop Idol runner-up Gareth Gates. "My dick, my dick, look it's bleeding," Gareth screams as they consummate their love. "It bloody well was too," Price adds, fascinated. If Angel is sub-Mills & Boon, Being Jordan is written in the style of a broken-hearted DIY manual. She watches Gareth on ITV2 and "on top of the pile of magazines in front of him was me on the cover of Loaded. It was really weird." She notes that she doesn't want people "leering up my bum. My bits," she adds darkly, "are my business."
Like Price, Angel loves a boy-band Casanova (he's called Mickey and "his hands slowly found their way under her skirt" and "caressed her through her silk thong") but Calorie reappears, now playing in the Premiership. Again I turn to Being Jordan for clarification. "What is it with me and footballers?" Price asks desperately. "We seem to be irresistibly attracted to each other, like moths to the flame!" She tells of affairs with Teddy Sheringham and Dwight Yorke, who greeted her after the birth of their son Harvey with the touching words "You look really rough and minging".
But Price is really a romantic, and in Angel the footballers are redeemed. Calorie rescues Angel from drug addiction - "it's the slippery slope!" - cooks her supper and, on the final page, proposes. Angel pouts yes and Price consigns her alter ego to a footballer's mansion with the deathless words "Angel had found her happy-ever-after at last".
Price disappoints in Angel - spiritually she's wearing pants. There is no real darkness or rage, no appearance on I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!, where she ate insects, and no Peter Andre, the singer whom she married last year (although she does describe his genitals in A Whole New World, the authorised account of their love). There is no OK! wedding, no panto appearance (Robinson Crusoe in Worthing in 1997), and no malevolence towards Price's celebrity nemesis, Posh Spice.
Still, the Jordan phenomenon continues to roll out, naked and available to the whole willing world. I suspect the next part of her life will be the most fascinating. As her body shrivels, will she hang up her thong or will she creak onwards towards the ever-receding spotlight?
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