"Kiss Chase" by Fiona Walker

KISS CHASE
Fiona Walker

My literary tastes are wide and varied, and I am a fan of the unfortunately named “chick lit” as much as the next girl in search of a mindless, trashy read. But there’s chick lit and there’s chick lit. It’s a term which, unfairly, widely encompasses pretty much every novel written by women, for women, including wonderful authors such as Marian Keyes and Joanne Harris, right through to the pitiful offerings from ex-page 3 girls and the archaic Mills & Boon. Reading the worst of it is like eating a McDonalds whilst staggering home from a night out on the tiles. At first it seems like the only thing that will satisfy your craving. After a few tasty mouthfuls, the flavour dulls and the juice leaks out. Half way through, you wonder why you’re bothering, and it’s only the fact that you’ve made it this far that forces you to persevere and finish the blasted thing. At the end, your bloated stomach is surprisingly satisfied, although it’s dampened by the fact that you are mired in cold shame and feeling embarrassingly dirty (and not in a good way). Five minutes after forcing the remaining bites into your ever-resisting mouth, you realise that you are incredibly empty. By the time you get home, you’re so ravenous, you may as well not have had anything to eat at all. Still, at least you can blame the booze.

I was travelling around New Zealand last year and searching for a read which would require minimum brain power and still provide a few laughs when I found Fiona Walker’s depressingly awful offering lingering on a stand outside a charity shop. Costing the equivalent of about 40p, it seemed bad manners not to give it a go, so I parted with my cash and eagerly set about starting. It didn’t take long before I was weary of Walker’s repetitive writing style and uninspiring characters, predictable scenes and tired relationships. You can’t feel empathy for the character of Saskia, who deserves a good slapping, nor for Phoebe, her bizarrely long-suffering “friend”. Rather than coming across as loyal, she appears spineless, dull and stupid, causing me to lose interest in her before the main plot line had even kicked off. It also irritated me profusely that Walker continually referenced the fact that Saskia was fat, as if this in itself was evidence of her emotional problems, and implying that once she had lost the weight she would be magically cured. Never mind the depression or the fact that she is a psychotic bitch, Saskia’s a size 16! Holy mother of god, it’s a national crisis! Do only beautiful people have happy lives in Walker’s plastic world? Why is it that those who do not possess supernatural beauty (apart from Saskia in her “Mental Period”, only peripheral characters with little impact or relevance) are deeply unattractive, sad, grey creatures who paw after the blissful, fabulous, beautiful, adored brilliance of the two central characters, Phoebe and the interminable Felix, but can never hope to achieve their greatness? Apparently if you don’t have legs as long as a redwood and cheekbones that could shave a dormouse, you don’t deserve happiness or a loving relationship; and more to the point, nobody would care even if you did.

Hello, Fiona? Remember Bridget Jones? Helen Fielding’s characters aren’t exactly realistic but they’re a damn sight more down-to-earth than these ones; and when their experiences and reactions are over the top, unlikely and ridiculous, we know full well that Fielding has her tongue lodged firmly in her cheek. Walker, however, seems to take herself far too seriously, which is probably her downfall. She needs to lighten up – at the appropriate moments – and try having a heroine with dodgy hair, or a hero whose six-pack is more likely to be kept in the fridge.

Why is it that so many chick lit authors feel the need to have a heroine who doesn’t think she’s that special to look at, but according to the rest of the world, is stunningly beautiful? Why are they inspired to make her act like someone with special needs? A decent author should be able to create comedy out of any situation, without needing to have a character fall tit over arse down some stairs and wind up with a pair of knickers on her head. Why does every book end “happily ever after” when they get their man? What happened to female emancipation?

Fiona Walker wanders blindly into all of these literary chick-lit clichés, and adds a few of her own for good measure. It should be a stone-carved rule that if an author insists on using slang terms, they must be varied regularly. Once a colloquialism has been used once, it is far more noticeable the second time; and by the fourth or fifth, the reader is begging for a thesaurus. The phrase which springs to mind is the use of “tight” for “drunk”. Although the deliberate misinterpretation of this word is ruminated upon at one point, that is no excuse to use it EVERY SINGLE TIME someone is tipsy, rat-arsed, or three sheets to the wind. For god’s sake, being drunk is surely a phrase with more euphemisms than any other in the English language (except, perhaps, sex). If she’d simply said “drunk” without variation, I doubt I would have noticed. But a little bit of slang goes a long, long way; especially something as old-fashioned as “tight”, which now serves simply as a regular milestone for Walker’s lack of range and cringingly dates the novel. A little imagination please, I beg of you! The same goes for espadrilles; a shoe in which, according to Walker, every woman in the UK encases her warm-weather tootsies. Whenever there’s a mention of shoes, they’re always bloody espadrilles! Ok, so it’s the summer, and Phoebe’s a casual, breezy kook: WE GET IT. But couldn’t she please slip her feet into a pair of sandals? Find some flats? Stagger in stilettos? Fling on some flip-flops? Whack on some wedges? It may be a petty complaint, but it sums up the rest of the novel, and was largely responsible for my increasing desire to chuck the dreary tome at the wall.

Walker’s characters are two-dimensional, ridiculous stereotypes, underdeveloped and, honestly, quite boring. The book is far too long and clearly has an incompetent editor. The language is limited and the storyline reeks of desperation. I anticipated that this bumper novel would be an enjoyable holiday read. It wasn’t. I persevered with it in the naïve, optimistic hope that it would get better towards the end. It didn’t. It leaves me with no question as to why this genre is viewed with such contempt when authors like Fiona Walker are championed in its ranks as literary royalty. Excuse me, but I’d like my 40p back.