Life comes at you fast when Jilly Cooper is in charge. Her latest novel, Tackle!, is published this week. If you are unfamiliar with the series, we are back in Rupert Campbell-Black’s pet-filled Cotswold idyll and he is still the most handsome man in the world (according to everyone).
We can learn a lot from Tackle!, as we can from the rest of Cooper’s oeuvre. But to get you up to speed: Rupert still has broken ribs (someone tried to murder him), Taggie has breast cancer, but Safety Car, a mesmerisingly ugly horse, is fine (he had been kidnapped). Feral, one of the scofflaw teenagers with a heart of gold from Wicked!, is back from Australia and about to come into his own as a footballer. Rupert has bought a football team for £20m that I think he won betting on his own horse. Or maybe he already had £19m in the bank, from being handsome, and won a million. The details are not important; it’s only money. Welcome to Rutshire.
Do the characters in Tackle! learn a lot about themselves? Not really. But who cares about that? The real question is: how do you live life like you mean it – like you are actually enjoying it?
When you think everyone is fantastically attractive, that helps. It’s 38 years since Rupert appeared in Riders. He is now 67, which means we met him when he was 29, although he came off more like 35. Never mind; age cannot wither him, being the handsomest man in the world. Of course, everyone biologically related to him, children and grandchildren, is outstandingly beautiful, as is his wider circle and household. It would besmirch his supremacy were he to stand next to anyone not handsome.
In Cooper’s world, everyone is attractive: they are “pale, dark and handsome,” “beautiful and wicked” and even “ravishingly pretty”.
Just about the only descriptor Cooper has ever used that does not mean handsome or beautiful is “weak-chinned”. She is to humans what David Attenborough is to animals: everything her eye falls upon she finds exquisite. Be more like that. Life will go easier on you, I promise. Here are other life lessons I have learned from her.
Always wear cashmere
Readers will remember, of course, when Rupert finally gives in to his love for Taggie O’Hara in Rivals. He thought he was too old and too much of a dog for her innocence and purity of spirit. He was right, but then she wore a grey cashmere polo neck. After that, nothing else mattered.
She still has her knitwear nailed. In Tackle!, she is in a blue poncho; I like to think it’s cornflower. Her daughter Bianca brings cheer with a flowery cashmere dressing gown, which must be the very devil to dry-clean, but so be it. Dora Belvedon – who is an amazing journalist and a cracking press officer, which has never happened – nails a job, also in blue cashmere, while the wives and the girlfriends (henceforth Wags, but you knew that) of the football players show off, variously and in no particular order, legs, curves, vulnerabilities, status, mischief and team spirit while bedecked in cashmere. Did a moth write this?
Learn to stop worrying and hate the woke
Rupert hates quinoa, avocados, poached chicken and any liquid that isn’t whiskey. Apparently the Guardian hates him, although I can tell you for free that we do not. Jackie Carslake, the editor of the Cotchester Times, hates not being allowed to ask women of childbearing age in a job interview whether he is going to have to cough up for maternity leave; everybody hates lefties and do-gooders, for reasons they all seem to think are completely obvious. Does it all make sense? Might they find they have more in common with the wokerati than they think if they got to know us? Do they realise that we also like dogs?
Men who are very bad tempered are apparently sexy
Rupert is not having a great time watching his wife going through her cancer treatment. “For Christ’s sake,” he yells at a nurse. “You’re supposed to be nurses – why can’t you find the fucking vein?” He makes Taggie a disgusting soup, which is meant to be endearing, then yells: “How the hell can you ever get better if you don’t eat?” Then she has to pretend to be asleep to avoid him.
Truth be told, he has been having a tantrum since he washed the vaginal deodorant out of Helen’s privates in 1985. He is always sleeping badly, and sustaining injuries, and pretending they don’t hurt, and crusading to victory (polo) with a dislocated shoulder, and covering his pain with stoicism and more tantrums. In Cooper’s telling,this is incredibly hot and he is exactly the kind of man you want in your corner (and four-poster bed).
All I can say is: kids, if you are reading this from under the veil of ignorance, absolutely don’t take it too literally. In real life, of course it’s not hot when someone makes you eat disgusting soup – it’s abusive.
Horsekind is also subject to patriarchal norms
The equine narrative architecture of Rutshire is fascinating. The horses act as repositories for all the deep human emotions, especially for the shy or overlooked characters, who can only be themselves around a horse, and also for the stiff-upper-lipped, who can only truly adore a horse.
Horses also hold a lot of the dynastic energy, as each prized thoroughbred sires another who looks just like him and wins stuff. Yet, in the end, they are dispensable; they can be bitten to death by other horses (Love Rat in Mount!) without disrupting the fundamentally romantic atmosphere. So, they are almost like a dialectical echo, the melodrama against the drama, the depth against the lightness.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Delectable, who is a horse, being the only filly in an otherwise male race and also very pretty, for a horse, is the subject of a lot of male horse attention. A lot of the male men talk as though they fancy her as well. But it’s fine, because it just makes her run faster.
Chemotherapy is a nightmare
It’s funny, with all this wish fulfilment (these chronicles get more and more like fairytales as they go along), to get a cold-hairdryer of medical reality. But you know how, in literary novels, no one ever has a job? It’s the same with cancer; they either get it and die or they get it and – plot twist – don’t die. None of them mention sitting on a plastic chair with a chemo drip, then their wee being mauve and their poo being like gravel. This is a useful corrective to the prevailing thinking on cancer – “stay positive”. Even if you don’t die, it’s still absolutely awful.
Give entrepreneurialism a shot – it’s much easier than it looks
Sir Craig Eynsham is a bad man, vain and rude. He is also extremely rich, thanks to inventing the following: a weight-loss drug; an acne drug; “SpecFind, in which you pressed a button and your glasses told you where they were”; a way of keeping deer off flower beds; a silver dye that you paint on your clitoris so that people can find it; and “Poover, in which you placed a nozzle to the anus and … it gently sucked out the crap”.
Really, though? Could one man invent these things, bring them to market and get rich enough to buy a football team? I have always doubted Cooper’s understanding of the business sphere. I had my doubts during Rivals about whether success was as easy as walking into a fundraising bid with three buttons of your shirt undone, rather than two. But, at the end of the day, she is rich and I am not.
Class is complicated
“People didn’t know she came from a posh family and I came from the gu’er,” Feral tells Rupert when he and Bianca get back from Australia. “We was sort of equal.” You could judge the social stratification of Rutshire very harshly, because everyone working class speaks a certain way, which in no way resembles any accent you will have heard.
Valent Edwards says “bluddy” because he is from Yorkshire, but how else would you pronounce “bloody”? He also says “fooking”, but what accent is that? Paris Alvaston, trying to teach public schoolboy wannabe footballers how to talk common (because “footballers resent public schoolboys”), advises that they start saying “pass” to rhyme with “gas”, by which I guess one infers that the working classes of the home counties also have to adjust their accents to play football because they are only allowed to come from Leicester.
So, on the face of it, the class politics are that posh is normal and anybody who isn’t posh must be mocked, but the mockery can’t sound anything like them. The true scorn and derision are reserved for characters who judge others for their accents (Valent’s son, Ryan; half the Wags) or people who speak out of their class (Rupert hates arrivistes almost as much as he hates chickpeas).
Fighting your way through these many contradictions, in which it’s bad not to be posh, but worse to be a snob, you start to wonder if the true target of the mockery is the hidden narrator, constantly wrongfooting itself with approximations that don’t sound anything like the accent it’s tilting at. Perhaps class itself has ceased to exist.
Footballers have to get the ball between the posts
There are three teams and they are all from the Cotswolds (I think?) and they are in division one, or maybe three. They are all up for relegation, or promotion, and one of them is on the way to Wembley, even though half of them should have retired and they all drank champagne – although not in its regular quantity, which is “buckets” – just before the game and won anyway. Or did they? Tackle! will not teach you a lot about football.
Bonkbusters are about the busting, not the bonking
Sure, there is a load of sex in every Cooper novel, but it’s told quite elliptically. These are no Fifty Shades, put it that way. When she won an OBE for services to literature in 2004, there was a lot of sniggering, mainly centred on the idea of the queen reading a book that had someone’s hand down someone else’s trousers on the cover. There was also an amount of mirth around whether or not all this counted as literature.
Cooper is an incredible storyteller. As anyone knows – anyone who has ever picked up a Nevil Shute on a book swap in a tube station, or a Graham Greene in someone else’s toilet, or accidentally opened a Muriel Spark while they were meant to be tidying – storytelling is a category outside concepts of highbrow or lowbrow, chick-lit or literature. It’s just a thing some people, but not very many, can do.
When she won her OBE, I wrote that I didn’t know what everyone was sniggering at; that Cooper was a genius. She wrote to me, saying that she didn’t realise anyone was laughing. I still feel bad about that.
