People like me
Christa D'Souza
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE by Nicholas Coleridge Orion, £16.99, pp. 374 Set in the world of magazines, Nicholas Coleridge's first novel, With Friends Like These, tells the story of Kit Preston, the managing editor of three glossies whose circulation figures keep inexplicably wan- ing. Among those who work for him is freelance journalist Anna Grant who has just interviewed the wife of a powerful German business tycoon. Anna is also interviewing a sinister entrepreneur from the Bahamas who has a Lear jet and is covertly involved in gun-running. Not long after the article on the tycoon's wife appears, Anna is found dead in her South Kensington flat. Could it be that she has committed suicide because of a hatchet job the Sunday Times has just run on her? Could she have been murdered by the ruthless tycoon, embarrassed by the fact that his wife has told Anna how bad he is in bed? Or by the gay Mickey Rice, editor of one of the three glossies, In Society, who has always been jealous of Anna's success? It is up to Kit to find out before he himself is arrested for her murder.
With Friends Like These, or With People Like Us, as it could have been called, is indeed a riveting and well-informed read. This is not surprising considering Coleridge's position as Conde Nast's Euro- pean Managing Director in which he pre- sides over Tatler, Vogue and GQ. An Eighties-style book laced with Nineties ref- erences such as business lunches at Daphne's, Sheryl Crow CDs, Adrian Zecha hotels and Dolce e Gabbana carrier bags, Would you mind not exuding pheromones while I'm eating?' With Friends Like Us is less well written than his sophisticated short stories, but intentionally so, I am sure, in order to appeal to a wider market.
That said, Coleridge 'art directs' each of his caricature-like scenes infinitely more stylishly and knowledgeably than, say, Julie Burchill did in Ambition. One scene which springs to mind is a fashion editorial meet- ing at one of his magazines, Couture, where ten fashion editors on aluminium stools bear ten black matching notebooks and three top editrices wear 'sharply fitting suits, respectively red Chanel, navy blue Valentino and beige Armani'. The identical juniors, meanwhile, are like 'tadpoles, black haired and incredibly pale and skin- ny', all as if from a scene from an updated version of Funny Face.
My two quibbles are, firstly, that Kit, our narrator, seems to have been given an American accent and he sometimes ends up sounding like a Pathe newsreader unsuccessfully attempting to do an impres- sion of Sam Spade (cf the end of Chapter Two: "Thanks Micky," I said, "You sure know how to make a guy feel great." But actually I did feel great. In fact I felt terrif- ic.') The second is that there is no index to help me get to the bits about myself more quickly. For I am Anna, the brilliant and talented journalist who also happens to be extremely good at rollerblading; Anna whose 'profiles of Cindy Crawford, Taki and Kerry Packer are models of their kind brimming with wry detail'; Anna whose body is 'very strong . . the product of hundreds of hours in the gym'; Anna who gathers her hair up into a soft roll and casually sticks a pencil through it; Anna `the direct and energetic lover' to whom Nicholas (I mean Kit) gives it a couple of times on the sofa until both of us (I mean them) are 'too f—d out' to do it anymore.
At least that's what Nicholas suggested the hook might be if I were to review With Friends Like These. But then Coleridge is the ultimate flatterer. Apparently there are quite a few of us out there: 30-ish, single hackettes, with flats in South Ken and lefty mothers in North London who think we are Anna.
With Friends Like These is neither eccen- tric nor wickedly funny, as I would describe Coleridge himself, but the lucrative genre in which this book belongs — Medium- Intelligent Shopping & Fucking — doesn't necessarily call for that. I spent a good part of the holidays secreting myself in the spare bedroom in order to read it in peace, hoping, praying, that it was indeed me who was Anna. Over the years, Nicholas and I have enjoyed a cordial if somewhat formal working relationship and if this is how he imagines I really am, who knows what the future at Conde Nast holds?
Christa D'Souza was formerly Editor at Large of Tatler and is currently a contribut- ing editor to Vogue.
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