Duncan Williamson: Book Review How to be Good hor2.html

Hot on the tails of my review last week of Nick Hornby's About a Boy comes this review, How to be Good. The contrast couldn't be more startling although on a sample of two books, Hornbyis firmly ensconced in New Labour type London. Rich pickings there I think.

This is an interesting story that has many good moments in it for people looking at middle aged people making a mess of their own and/or others' lives. I have to say though that for personal reasons I found the first third of the book much more melacholy than funny.

Katie is a GP (and boy don't we know it) and her husband David is a local newspaper's Mr Angy: he writes a column in which he is permanently angry. We meet Katie in flagrante delicto, however, in Leeds, with Stephen, at a conference.

Katie drones on about her life and her misery and her husband. What a sham it all is, she is not in love any more, her husband is too angry, she is a doctor after all. Her two children are precious: Tom is the elder of the two and Molly is the daughter. Molly! It's almost as bad as the poor South African child on the Archers called Knolly. The children aren't exactly precocious but sometimes they are given wit and wisdom beyong their years.

David is unaware of his problems except that he is acting the role of someone in a loveless or at best stale marriage. He goes to see a faith healer and, to cut a long story short, takes him home to stay.

The faith fealer is DJ GoodNews and looks a real heap: hair, clothes, pins through ey brows, the lot. He moves in and David gives up his job as a columnist and he and GoodNews set to work to put the world to rights.

GoodNews sets the house alight to some extent: they organise a street meeting during which they entreat their neighbours to do what David did and invite a homeless person to take up a spare room. Their neighbours are, predictably enough, gay actors, butch nahdymen, ordinary suburbanites ... and they manage to persuade some people to take some people in. Of course, it doesn't run that smoothly and you can imagine some of what goes wrong.

Tom becomes problematic at school and it turns out that he feels unwanted and unloved as David, at the behest of GoodNews, have been giving the kids' goods and chattels away.

Tom is against. Molly feels some affinity for her father's new direction!

Katie has more sex but with Stephen: not a lot but it happens. She moves into a flat round the corner; but only when the kids have gone to bed and she gets home before the kids wake up.

And so it goes on. Katie moaning. David's epiphany. GoodNews with his wackbag ideas. Tom and Molly wistful.

By accident, Katie invites one of her patients, Barmy Brian (BB), round for dinner: he's unfortunately not a full shilling and his mother, who organised and ran his every move, has just died ... I laughed out loud when BB arrived at Katie's place

GoodNews joins us as e are serving up
'Hi,' he says to Brian, 'I'm GoodNews.'
'How d'you mean?' Brian asks nervously

There's a bit more dialogue around that and it is Tom who explains that Brian doesn't understand that GoodNews is a name not a statement!

That's it really. Much of a mid life crisis story that just rolls amiably along. The book's full of snippets and cameos that clearly I have hardly scratched at here. Ithinkit sits happily along side About a Boy and I will certainly buy another Hornby from my local charity shops if and when they appear.

GoodNews moves out and they all live happily ever after as well, by the way.