The Black Dress

​Pru(dence) is a woman on the cusp of her seventh decade and about to have her life fall apart. She has lived in comfortable upper-middle-class Muswell Hill in London with her husband Greg for more than forty years and raised her two children there. Her best friend is the outspoken Azra (not her real name) who hails from Sunderland but has reinvented herself as a radical and unconventional hippy type. Greg appears to dislike Azra and she seems likewise intolerant of his conservative dullness. The truth is quite different when Pru discovers they’ve been having an affair for five years and they move to Dorset together.

Pru is left alone in her large home feeling betrayed, furious and sorry for herself. Wearing a black dress she found in a charity shop in Deal, she goes to a funeral of a friend in Golders Green only to discover she’s made a mistake in the time and is at the wrong service. Pru bemoans her aloneness and desperately wants a man in her life and this sets up a pattern where she goes to funerals of people she doesn't know but looking for suitable widowers. Her first target is Evan, a vet, but her plans are stymied.

If only the book had stayed on this black comedic course, had more subtlety and kept up its wry observations, but it went off on ridiculous tangents including excessive swearing and overly-detailed passionate encounters that no average arthritic seventy-something would have the energy for.  My initial chuckles from the first few chapters waned as Pru became increasingly annoying with her self-absorbed whining. A further adventure involving an Australian helicopter pilot mourning his deceased model wife misfired abysmally. Apart from Pam, a nosey-parker neighbour with a kind heart, none of these characters have any attractive human qualities.  No wonder Pru’s children moved away to foreign countries.

It was all I could do to get to through to the end, if only to see what eventuated. There are the usual twists, a far-fetched renewed relationship and even the Covid lockdown, but it’s all a waste of time. The only creature I felt any emotion for by the end was the incontinent cat.

This is the first novel I’ve read by the author who created the famous Exotic Marigold Hotel and it was a huge disappointment. It is hoped some of her other books are better than this but not sure I'll be tempted.
 
One star.
 
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