I am sure anyone would agree that we are living at the
moment in very uncertain times; the
world is undergoing great change politically and physically and ordinary people
(thee and me) are reluctant witnesses, it seems, to many international injustices both large
and small so we must look for any form of escapism that works – and reading,
the art of the story, still features hugely with the majority of us: we need something elevating and heartwarming
to remind us that the world is still a good place., and such a story is Graham
Norton’s ‘Frankie’.
In Ireland, Frances Howe’s parents died in a car accident
when she was ten years old; Frances was
an only child and her care was taken over by her mother’s sister who was
married to an Anglican minister who tended to address everyone in biblical
phrases, always careful to stress how charitable her aunt and he were being in
providing her a home. Frances’s only
happiness at this time was her schoolfriend Norah’s home in which she was
always welcomed by Norah’s refreshingly normal parents; sadly, this situation changed when Frances
was seventeen: her Uncle married her off
to another clergyman who was much older than she and when her new life
commenced, Frances found that the reality of being a Canon’s wife was vastly
different from what she’d imagined – including the marital bed, the mysteries
of which remained as opaque as ever.
Until Frances, delivering eggs to needy parishioners as part of her
wifely duties, met one of the flock whose very presence ignited an eroticism
with which Frances was entirely unfamiliar:
needless to say, there was no happy outcome for Frances; her sham marriage was over, she was ‘cast
out’ by her anything-but-saintly husband, and exiled to London, to share a flat
with Norah.
And Norah had been having adventures of her own, deciding
that the company of women was infinitely more preferable than men, but she was
instrumental in ‘retraining’ Frances in the secretarial arts – shorthand and
typing, filing etc – to an efficiency that earned Frances a trip to New York
with her new Boss, a woman of ‘that’ persuasion hoping to change her new
secretary’s mind as to her sexual preferences – which didn’t happen, and after
a disasterous start to her time in The Big Apple, Frances becomes Frankie and
her real life, with its stratospheric highs and dismal lows, finally begins.
Graham Norton in his Acknowledgements pages says that his
editor always makes him feel like a novelist rather than a chat-show host with notions.
Well, the wonderful protagonist he has created is a shining example of
his talent at story-telling on the grand scale:
I defy anyone to say that they were not fully engaged with Frankie’s
adventures, from her sad beginnings to her loving end, for this is a story of
love in all its colours and stripes, and that is what the world certainly needs
at this troubling time. FIVE STARS.
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