The Beginning of Everything

 I've been really confused by a book. Challenged by it, in a way. It's a romance, romantic fiction, a genre I've never read before. I've swerved bodice-rippers, bonkbusters, Mills and Boon and Barbara Cartland, and that's what I thought popular romance novels were. But this, this is something else completely. This is a book about me. I know these people. Somehow, finally, I'm implicated in romance. 

I don't often see representation of people like me in the media. I'm not interesting. I'm statistically negligible. Alright, there is a freshly minted archetype: The Radio 6 Dad, and despite lacking one important qualification for that title, it's the first time I've felt "seen" in a long time. Gen X has been squeezed out of the narrative by the Boomer/ Millennial grudge-match, and we're indistinguishable from Boomers to Gen Y and Z or whatever Gen we're up to now. We're all just unimaginably old. The thought of us falling in love must be borderline harrowing to the supple and the wrinkle-free. We're sexless Mums and Dads, generic silly sausages, to be eye-rolled at by hot faced teens, outraged by our existence.

But we did DO stuff. Do do stuff. We were people before we were parents, and in this book here we are - fully realised human beings, with storied lives, defined by neither our children or parents, just us. And we're fucked up, infuriating, funny (not "Dad Gag" funny. Funny funny), attempting to navigate our hectic, baggage-strewn lives. And that's what Jackie Fraser offers here. This is a romantic novel where the protagonist suffers from PTSD. Is this normal? They sell this book in supermarkets. It feels subversive. These are not the sort of people who have their stories told. 

When we meet Jess, she's a woman in her forties, living in a tent in a graveyard, having run away from her toxic relationship. She's middle-aged and homeless, drifting around a Welsh town she doesn't know, sheltering in the library, keeping herself to herself. Winter is coming in and, after casing the joint, she breaks into an empty house. It's not warm, but its warmer. She can have baths. There's electricity, so she can charge her phone and boil the kettle. It's better. Or at least its better until the new owner lets himself in and catches her, forcing her to flee, leaving all her belongings behind her. Great. She's properly in the shit. 

But she's not. Not at all. Gethin, the new owner, allows her to get her stuff back and, more than that, suggests she can stay there in a sort of custodial capacity, looking after the place as he's not ready to move in. As they get to know each other, he comes to value her interior design skills and she helps him dress his new home, eventually staying on as a rent paying lodger. His sister is wary, but not as wary as Jess herself. She is cautious, self-protecting, anxious not to make any mistakes. While slowly realising her attraction to Gethin (really slowly) she's in no hurry to enter another relationship. Gethin waits. He gives her space. He puts up with indignity and disappointment along the way. He wants her to be happy. 

Fraser knows her tropes. Jess is a modern spin on "The Bolter",  the most famous being Fanny's mother in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, who is incapable of settling down in a relationship. It transpires that Jess has very real reasons for bolting, and her lack of interest in pursuing another relationship. Gethin too is a reaction to a romantic trope. Fraser wondered why the desirable men in romances were always standoffish and troubled. Grave Bryronic figures who are unapproachable and have to be won over, normally over the course of an entire novel. They're usually very rich, so it all works out. 

Gethin is rich, but he's just a really nice man. Kind, funny, generous, patient and empathetic, he's a paragon. Seriously, the Manosphere will find much to hate here. There's no negging, Gethin is possing from the get go. The novel is a slow burn - it's 200 plus pages before they kiss - and throughout Gethin is just so nice. Another weird subversive edge - the hero who is a decent man. You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never does. When problems arise they come from other directions. Gethin is a pole star, unerring.  

Fraser's prose is crisp, precise and elegant. Jess has a painterly eye with a strong sense for composition. She easily puts things together, whether its a recipe or a beautifully finished living space. The only thing she can't put together is herself, and Fraser deftly keeps pointing out this obvious blind spot to the reader while leaving Jess in the dark. As a flatmate, interior designer or washer-upper Jess is conscientious, grounded and dependable. As a narrator, completely unreliable. She doesn't see what's right in front of her face, even while the reader is screaming "Hello?" at her!

Jess' backstory is full of stretched mohair sweaters, colourful hair, squats and Merrydown cider. She makes playlists of an agreeably alternative nature - though she's a respecter of pop. She's a decent cook and has a sophisticated eye for home furnishings and antiques. She buys a crap car and pootles around town in it. Her idea of a good time is a picnic by a ruined castle that will inevitably be rained upon. She's the most relatable fictional character I've read in a very long time. I know her. That could so easily be me in in a tent in a Welsh graveyard, flinty and stubborn under canvas. Jess nails this book down like tent pegs. She's real. We believe the story because she can't quite. She has trust-issues. She feels vulnerable. Yet she's resilient and tough, because she has to be - she expects no better. She thinks this is her life now. 

She gets lucky. She breaks into the right house. The House of Love. A reference she would get twice over. And that's why I like her.