Title: Blind Date
Author: Frances Fyfield
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: worthy
Frances Fyfield is from my own home county of Derbyshire in England, and this is my own signed hardback copy! How cool is that! How many author's signatures do you have on your Nook screen?! lol!
So, too cool, but if only I could be sure I'll like it! So, a blind date with Blind Date! I have to confess that I found this novel almost impossible to get into for the first thirty or forty pages, then it all started settling down. I’d advise a re-write of those first pages were I Fyfield's editor. At one point she's in first person, then loses that for third person. Very little of what she wrote in those pages made very much sense to me; then it’s like someone else took over and the novel was fine.
The story features Elisabeth, a young woman who got drunk one night and tripped over while walking home, and while she was lying there half asleep, some psycho who had been stalking people prior to this, threw acid onto her. Fortunately, she was laying in such a way that her face was largely protected, but her body was severely burned, her skin even dissolved in several places, and her surgery to correct this hasn't exactly been stealthy. I can empathize with Elisabeth a little, having accidentally knocked scalding hot water onto my back when I was very young, but mine is hardly a scar which stands out in public. It does lend a whole nude meaning to "keep your shirt on" though!
We join Elisabeth staying with her mother in Devon at her boarding house. She hates it there, her only comfort being her 12 year old brother (whom I suspect of being the acid thrower, warped wretch that I am, but there is another potential suspect revealed later, so maybe I am as warped as I claim!). Even though she isn't completely recovered from her trauma, Elisabeth prevails upon her friend Patsy (shades of Absolutely Fabulous!) to return her to London. Patsy is something of a fair-weather friend of Elisabeth's, resenting her neediness now that she's injured.
Back in London, Elisabeth moves back into her bell tower. She lives in the bell tower of an old church, one which is largely disused, so the bells haven't rung in years. She wakes up in the night to discover someone else is staying there - a large, gentle young man who was occupying the place during her absence, doing some work around the church. After her initial fear that he was an intruder, they reconcile their positions and he plans on leaving the very next day. She fails to recall that he is the same guy, Joe, who she saw hanging around during one of her hospital visits in Devon....
In addition to Elisabeth, we’re introduced to a small group of young professional women, of which Patsy is one, Hazel another, and Angela the third. They're in relationship doldrums and decide to join an introductory dating service to find a decent guy for themselves. Angela, who has already signed on for this service, but who keeps this secret from the other two, is supposed to meet with a guy (nicknamed 'Owl' because of his eyeglasses) who also joined the dating service but kept it secret from his three male friends (Joe, Rob, and Michael) who were talking about joining it - at Michael's suggestion!
Angela turns up dead. Patsy gets an invitation from the same dating service. None of these girls talk to each other about what they're up to - except that Patsy does confide in Elisabeth, who, having kicked Joe out, has now started to become friendly with him and is lured out for a bus trip around the sights of London with him.
Meanwhile, the rather weird woman who runs the dating service seems to have an oddball relationship with her rather oddball son. The plot sickens! But this story continues to intrigue me. During the first thirty or forty pages I was really becoming frustrated with it, and when I read bits and pieces of it over the weekend, I was frustrated, but reading it at other times, including at lunchtime today, I was drawn right back into it. The problem I think is that this novel is dense and serious and it doesn't take kindly to being read in dribs and drabs, or when there are interruptions going on around you. But if you sit down with it and treat it with respect, and give it some time, then it will be kind to you! How odd is that? It’s like the novel is the physical real-world manifestation of the fictional female protagonist within. I don’t know if Fyfield deliberately created it like this, but it’s a wonderfully enlightening concept which has really made an impression on me as a writer!
So Patsy survives her encounter with Michael, the son of Cynthia, warped and wefted adult child that he is, and she passes on her knowledge of him to Joe and Elisabeth, who are now becoming much more comfortable with each other, although she's as irascible as ever. In a bygone era, I could imagine a young Katherine Hepburn playing her and playing her well. Michael is carrying a psychic wound from someone who was unkind to him, and I believe that the person who did this to him is none other than Elisabeth herself, who caught him stealing when they were both kids, and reported him - although that alone seems insufficient to warp him as much as he is. So now he's killing women who are unkind to him, which is why Patsy is still alive. It makes me worry about what will happen to Elisabeth if this is what happened. How is she going to handle the guilt-trip that drops on her when she learns that she set this killer in motion? Or am I completely wrong in my assessment? It wouldn't be the first time!Both Joe and Elisabeth go to sign on with Cynthia's match-making agency, but Joe deliberately plays himself as an uncouth character and is thrown out, whereas Elisabeth, who remembers Cynthia from the incident during her childhood, is rushed through the sign-on process and hurried out the door a little more kindly. Now it appears that Michael has his hands on a key to her church tower, so things are slowly coming to a head.
I'm not sure I'm too keen on Joe. He strikes me as being a little bit creepy, but Elisabeth I am in love with, and looking forward to reading how this all pans out. As it looks right now, I'm pretty much expecting there to be a showdown in the tower rather reminiscent of the ending to Hitchcock's Vertigo, but with a bell falling on Michael (assuming he's indeed the villain and not an appallingly stinking red herring!) or something along those lines. We'll see!
Well I finished this and I did get something right! The ending struck me as a bit vague, and Joe's behavior seemed so at odds with how he'd been characterized earlier that it bothered me to a degree, but considering characterization and general writing quality, I recommend this novel because of Elisabeth.
