Saturday, November 10, 2007
Soft porn designed for grannies
At the Sunday Times, Melissa Katsoulis reflects on the fiction of Barbara Taylor Bradford. I'm especially linking because of the good phrase she comes up with (I've borrowed it for the header!) which really does express the peculiarity of this genre, my English grandmother was in fact very fond of exactly this kind of book which she read very sedately on the couch in the sitting room in the late afternoon after having had a useful day of laundry, cooking, cleaning etc.! (Novel-reading before lunchtime was considered excessively decadent by the women of this generation and social class....)
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I loved these books as a late teenager, but then I always knew I was old before my time ;-)
ReplyDeleteSeriously, though, I was lucky enough to read her before she hit truly mega mega and started churning them out to standard forumla. Her first few books were really gripping, I think, quite innovative in their way. But I stopped reading here when the (many) sequels seemed rather too contrived. Judith Krantz is another writer of this ilk -- her first couple were quite good in a guilty kind of way, but for me she soon palled because of increasingly weak iterations of the formula (not that robust to begin with -- remember Princess Daisy? Very hyped, in its day -- possibly a precursor to Jilly Cooper though I have not checked my chronology-- I have this idea that JC was still doing lifestyle journalism when BTB and JK were in their heyday, and took on their crown with relish after they had peaked, but this is from memory so evidence could prove me wrong).