"The city background of these contemporary thirty-something professionals is painted with a light yet vivid touch, adding to the enjoyment of a novel that is both most entertaining and elegantly written."
Born
in Indonesia of French parents, and brought up in France and Australia, Sophie
Masson is the award-winning and internationally-published author of over 60
books for children, young adults and adults. Her latest young adult novel is Hunter's Moon, (Random House Australia) while her latest adult
novel is Trinity: The False Prince, (Momentum.)
Sophie is also a founding partner and co-director of Christmas Press, a
boutique publishing house producing acclaimed children's picture-books and
fiction. She holds a
BA and M.Litt from the University of New England in Australia and is currently
undertaking a PHD in Creative Practice at the same university. She is on the
Boards of the Australian Society of Authors, the New England Writers' Centre
and the Small Press Network. She has also served on the Literature Board of the
Australia Council and the Book Industry Collaborative Council.
Writing
about nice, ‘ordinary’ people, in a way that will make readers want to keep
turning the pages, is not easy. And writing about nice people made tentative
and ineffectual by life’s defeats and challenges—and other people’s attitudes
and expectations--is harder still. In many ways, it’s so much simpler to write
flamboyant, selfish, silly or psychopathic characters: those extreme
personality traits can be very useful characterisation shortcuts. So it’s a
real achievement when a writer not only pulls off the difficult task, but does
it with keen observation and generous wit, as Jon Appleton does in his debut
novel, Ready to Love.
As its title
indicates, Ready to Love can broadly
be described as a romantic comedy. Set in contemporary London, it’s centred
around two main characters: Minna, who’s just ended a relationship with
self-absorbed Julian, latest in a short line of unsatisfactory lovers; and
Jeff, still hurting from the breakup with his equally self-absorbed wife Sarah a
year ago. Neither Minna nor Jeff have been ‘high-flyers’ or ‘movers or shakers’
in the world of work anymore than they have been marked successes in their love
lives, but they are good people who try to do the best they can by their
colleagues and families and friends. Unfortunately, that can lead to them being
patronised or even bullied by stronger personalities who think that they know better
than Minna or Jeff what each of them are like or should do.
The reader
hopes of course that these two nice yet rather bruised and tentative—but never
pathetic or unsympathetic-- people will eventually find the beginnings of
happiness with each other once they realise that they are, indeed, ‘ready for
love’, but it’s not just that, pleasant as it is, which keeps you absorbed in
the novel. In an interview I conducted recently with Jon Appleton, he said that, Ready to Love is about the
way we see ourselves and how we think other people see us, and the different
kinds of attachments we form to those around us: family, friends, lovers,
colleagues. And that is what makes the book so satisfying: too often, in
romantic comedies, the focus is just on the search for love, but in this novel,
the author does not forget the other large chunks of life, including the everyday
world of work, which in real life takes up so much of people’s time, thoughts,
and emotional energy. And the great cast of secondary characters, from all the
different areas of Minna’s and Jeff’s lives, are deftly sketched in with
telling detail.
Jon also mentioned
in the interview how important the novel’s London setting was to him, as the
idea for it came out of a feeling of homesickness when he was living away from
his London home for a year, but was developed fully later, when he was back.
That development is evident in the novel, where the city background of these
contemporary thirty-something professionals is painted with a light yet vivid
touch, adding to the enjoyment of a novel that is both most entertaining and
elegantly written.
Author site: www.sophiemasson.org
Blog: www.firebirdfeathers.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sophiemasson1
1 comment:
Thank you, Sophie. That's an excellent point about the difficulty of writing about unexceptional characters, and indeed it's one of the strengths of Jon's book. I also liked the way he showed how adults behave when they're back at home with their parents - a sort of unwitting return to adolescence. I think a great many readers will recognise that!
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