Jump for joy

Salma Mahmud
has an autographed copy of Jilly Cooper's new novel Jump!

She may have suffered a mild stroke some months ago, but Super Cooper is up and running with her latest bonk-buster that gallops along gamely, despite several lukewarm reviews. The general consensus is that she still remains a great English institution, and a new Jilly read is as comforting as ‘kitchen sups,’ even though it may be as raucous a page-turner as its predecessors. And hardened literary critics pay homage to her as the Queen of the Bonkbuster.

She coude much of wandering by the waye,

Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye…

Of remedies of love she knew perchaunce,

For she could of that art the olde daunce.

These are two random couplets from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, in which he describes the wandering, raunchy Wife of Bath, who has run through five husbands and is eagerly looking for a sixth one. She is gap-toothed (gat-tothed), which in medieval times was believed to indicate a lascivious character.

Far be it from us loyal readers to cast aspersions on that delightful gap-toothed Jilly Cooper smile, topped by an endearing button nose, or on her personal life which is as pure as the driven snow by all accounts. She is certainly no Jackie Collins who was a flasher in Regents Park long ago, and had an affair with Marlon Brando at a young age. Flasher? Brando? Perish the thought. For her, drinking a Sloe Gin, the ultimate country cocktail, with her daughter, is a guilty pleasure.

She is full of cheerful chitchat nowadays, giggling along, having put aside her elderly manual typewriter Monica for the time being. (Jackie Collins writes her novels in long hand, by the way.) She descends from her 14th century chantry in the Cotswolds, the home of all the Hooray Henries and the Okay Yeahs of Sloanedom. She has been a close friend of Camilla Parker-Bowles for many years, and most of her 16 novels are set in the fictional county of Rutminster and its environs, which is situated in hallowed, leafy Gloucestershire, where wild garlic spills its intoxicating scent over the hedgerows. And Rupert Campbell-Black is an inevitable part of the scenery.

Life remains a lark, even though carers are now part of the Cooper household, and Jilly has to write out of financial necessity, since husband Leo suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. Jilly doesn’t go out much any longer, so the characters in her latest book are her family. Jump! is, like its predecessor Wicked! (2006), set in Larkshire, and has a cast list of 81, excluding the horses and other four-footed animals.

It took four years to write. These days Cooper is busy setting up characters for her next book, which will be about flat racing, ‘to keep her in the company of brave jockeys, obsessive trainers and capricious owners, and will feature the irredeemable owner-trainer, Rupert Campbell-Black.’ He will, believe it or not, be facing his 60th birthday crisis. All faithful fans please take note.

Among the many colourful characters in these novels there is the black figure of Sir Roberto Rannaldini, mega-maestro and arch fiend, with musical directorships in Berlin, New York and Tokyo, who lives in Valhalla in Rutminster, surrounded by a maze and a lake and a mere. He is a tremendous classical music conductor, but is also a molester of nubile girls. Flora Seymour, for instance, ‘wild child and pilgrim soul, is destroyed by a teenage affaire with Rannaldini.’ He is eventually murdered in Score! , by… but hush, I can’t possibly present you with a spoiler. While he storms through two novels, his presence, along with that of his larger-than-life mistress Dame Hermione Hatfield, the world-famous diva, is of great interest to all lovers of Western classical music, especially opera.

Apart from the myriad characters from all classes of society, including the little horrors of Larkminster Comprehensive, in Wicked!, there is the delightful bonus of the double frontispiece maps of the areas connected with several novels. You can spend many a pensive moment walking up and down the lanes and by-lanes of rural Gloucestershire, with streams and woods and churches and homesteads delineated in detail. There is also an entertaining cast of characters for every novel, with witty comments about each personality included gratis. For example there is Detective Constable Debbie Miller in Score! who is ‘a pulchritudinous policewoman.’ And that mouthful of an adjective means ‘beautiful’, it seems. Cheryl Shaw is the justifiably jealous wife of Alpheus P. Shaw, the world-famous American tenor, and she is ‘a great tree and social climber.’ The Rev. Percival Hillary, a portly parson, ‘confines his pastoral visits to drinks time.’

Many are the animals who throng the pages of Jilly Cooper’s irresistible fiction, which is compulsively readable partly because of these delightful beings, who are dogs, cats and above all horses. And there is even a goat as well as a sheep in Jump!, the latter being modelled on a certain member of the media. (When she cottoned on to the joke she was definitely not amused.)

The amount of research that Jilly Cooper puts into her novels is mind-boggling, and she is seriously well-read to boot. The 1991 novel Polo, for instance, is about the game of princes, and is set in the estancias of Argentina, as well as Palm Beach and Deauville, and then on to the royal polo fields of England and the glamorous pitches of California… the arena is vast and sprawling, but Cooper is at home everywhere. Pandora (2002) is based on the contemporary art scene, in which some rather successful swipes are taken at the Saatchi-fuelled excesses of Britart. Her very first novel, Riders (1985) , was set in show jumping, its sequel Rivals (1989) in TV, and Appassionata (1996) and Score! (1999) in classical music. No wonder Cooper is now an OBE, which she got for her services to literature, no less, as well as the holder of an honorary doctorate of letters from Gloucestershire University for her contribution to literature and services to the country. And the Queen, it is rumoured, enjoys a jolly good Cooper read whenever she gets the chance.

There is so much drama in these works: Perdita Macleod riding into a highflying fancy dress event naked as Lady Godiva, Angel Solis De Gonzales bursting into a hospital to stop poor little rich girl Bibi Alderton from having plastic surgery. And the characters have such glamorously silly names: The Honourable Basil/Bas Bassington, Chessie France-Lynch, Commander ‘Fatty’ Harris, Cassandra Murdoch, and so forth; while the author appears to be having so much fun while writing these eventful plots that her fans are inevitably swept away with her into the land of posh.

Jilly Cooper also keeps up with the latest social trends in Brit land, for we see that in Wicked! there is a key Pakistani family, with Aysha Khan a Larkminster high achieving student, and her bullying father who wants to get her married off in Pakistan, and her mother who is always there for her. But it is in Jump! that we see something quite enchanting, where Rafiq Khan is a magnificently moody Pakistani with matchless looks and militant tendencies. After a stint in prison for unfairly suspected terrorism, he learns to love and look after racehorses and tries to make it as a jockey. He also plays a key role in this aggressively horsey novel… a milieu in which Jilly Cooper is most at home. He sings lullabies in a language of his own, probably Pushto, to Mrs Wilkinson, who is definitely Jilly Cooper’s most inspired creation to date. No, this is not a human lady love, but a horribly mutilated filly who is discovered one night by Etta Bancroft, sweet, kind and still beautiful at 60, and is nursed back to health by her and turns out to be a spectacularly well-bred racehorse, not just any old filly. She is eventually entered into the Grand National, with results which cannot be revealed, as I am not a believer in spoilers, as earlier attested by me.

Etta is recently widowed, and her selfish, ambitious children drag her from her lovely Dorset home to live in a hideous modern bungalow in the Cotswold village of Willowwood. After Etta has rescued Mrs Wilkinson, she is granted court custody of this treasure and a village syndicate is formed to put Mrs W into training. The syndicate consists of a riotous mix of local characters who travel to various races in a minibus. Mrs W is ridden by Rupert Campbell-Black’s ravishing god-daughter Amber Lloyd-Fox, who is encountering bias against women jockeys, and progresses from point-to-point and then to major races, bringing fame and fortune to the syndicate. Finally comes the Grand National, and much calamity follows. As in all Jilly Cooper novels. True Love does eventually triumph, and the lovely Etta, who had a secret crush on devastating Rupert Campbell-Black, finds happiness in the charismatic arms of an ex-Premier League goalkeeper, who is well-heeled and able to stand up to his lady love’s awful family. And so the world lights up for Etta, as it does for all Jilly Cooper fans.

Salma Mahmud lives in Lahore

May 13-19, 2011 - Vol. XXIII, No. 13