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Book Reviews Title Married
Alive Fiction-Net
Rating Buy It
From Amazon.co.uk - BUY
NOW! Cover
Story Nicole is your
average 1990's babe: fun-loving, hard-drinking,
independent, sassy. She's met Mr Right, sexy
photographer Matt, and they share a cool loft
conversion in London's Docklands. Nicole's life is
most definitely sorted - until she decides to
rescue her gran, Liza, from a fate worse than death
(an old people's home) and brings her back to the
Docklands Loft. When Matt returns
from a photoshoot, expecting Nicole's enthusiastic
welcome, and finds Liza, minus her false teeth but
ready and willing, he is less than amused. And when
Nicole suspects Matt is having an affair with a
page-three model, and her gran appears to prefer
the company of a twelve year old nymphet she picked
up in the streets, things go from bad to worse. Is
this a case of Hell being other people? Or is she
well on the way to being buried - or married -
alive. We
Say Known for being
angry and outspoken, Julie Burchill pulls no
punches with her style in "Married Alive". Now, the
great thing about this is when it works well it can
be funny and frighteningly sharp. Some of the
one-liners are great, "I'd noticed this thing about
my thighs recently - that they always went to bed
ten minutes after I did. Like we were at boarding
school and they were in a higher form or
something." However, I can't
help thinking that Burchill takes this too far and
you end up feeling like there's nothing to make you
really care about these characters. Sure, Nicole
has her problems and goes to see a psychiatrist but
then it seems like this is just a crucial accessory
to her fashionable angst-ridden modern life. She
uses drugs for the same reason, but perceptively
says, "I'll tell you the problem with drugs;
whereas most things are either the problem or the
solution, drugs are the problem and the solution".
She also rescues her gran, the one person she seems
to really love but who she turns against and
rejects for disrupting her trendy Docklands
lifestyle. Nicole is clever, funny and rebellious
but I'm not sure that she seemed very real.
It would have
been nice to see more genuine vulnerability in
Nicole to provide some contrast with the humour. In
fact, all the characters could have been more
three-dimensional. Even so, "Married Alive" is a
good read, with a plot that moves along quickly and
does keep you entertained. Maybe we should just
trust Nicole (and Burchill) when she presents this
empty lifestyle to us and says, "Trust me, I'm a
modern." Review by: Rachel
Taylor |
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