Soft and hard romance

David Sexton

A SECRET AFFAIR by Barbara Taylor Bradford HarperCollins, £9.99, pp. 224 THE BONNY DAWN by Catherine Cookson

Bantam, £9.99, pp. 192 The Booker's a bluff. Barbara Taylor Bradford and Catherine Cookson, on the other hand, are serious business.

Bradford's dozen novels have sold more than 55 million copies worldwide. In 1992, she negotiated a three-book deal with HarperCollins for £20 million. At one time, she was estimated to be the richest British woman after the Queen.

Cookson, who did not begin writing until she was 40, has now published over 90 titles, selling an average of a million each. Her popularity seems to have been less proficiently exploited than Bradford's, or perhaps she appeals to less acquisitive readers. The real measure of Cookson's appeal comes each year in the PLR returns: invariably, she accounts for a larg- er proportion of the most frequently bor- rowed titles than anybody else — in one year, 35 out of the top 100.

As packages, these two new lines look remarkably similar. Both are small in size and quite short too. Both put the author's name (her brand) above the title (the par- ticular product). Both feature pictures of rosy dawns, or possibly russet sunsets, on the cover, hinting lightly at romance.

The contents, however, could hardly be more different. Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Secret Affair is so inept that, approached in the right spirit, it becomes quite treasur- able. Bill Fitzgerald is the 'chief foreign correspondent for CNS, the American cable news network' — first seen being heroic in Bosnia:

His fair coloring and clean-cut, boyish good looks belied his 33 years, and his tough deameanor stood him in great stead in front of the television camera. He had earnest blue eyes and a warm smile.

Bill has a great sorrow. His wife died in childbirth (`she had been too young to die, only 26'), leaving him with a daughter, six- year-old Helena, who has

delicate, perfectly sculpted features, wide-set cornflower-blue eyes that mirrored Bill's, and glossy, dark blonde hair that fell in waves and curls to her shoulders.

Holidaying with a buddy in Venice — 'La Serenissima, the Venetians called it'— Bill literally bumps into 27-year-old American glass designer Vanessa Stewart — 'lumi- nous silver eyes set in a pale, piquant face'. It is November and these three are, myste- riously, the only Americans in the city. Vanessa agrees to come to a Thanksgiving dinner with them — provided there's a turkey. Bill's buddy is doubtful that it can be done: `Where the hell do you think you're going to find a turkey? In Venice, of all places, for God's sake! This is pasta land, Billy.' But resourceful Bill manages, and in no time Bill and Vanessa have become lovers, prompting the novel's most ambitious descriptive passage:

Carefully he undid the suspenders and rolled down each stocking, took off one, then the other. His eyes ravished her body, so trim and lean, yet shapely. Unfastening the garter belt, he slipped it off . 'Yes', she cried, 'Oh yes, Bill.'

Alas, Vanessa turns out to be married already. So begins the 'secret affair' so deli- cately alluded to in the title. 'Clandestine though it must be, I want our affair to con- tinue', confirms Bill.

However, Vanessa's husband is a lawyer and he doesn't want children either, so he's jettisoned without regret. Blue and silver eyes seem about to live happily ever after. But wait! Bill is making a TV special about terrorism.

He goes to Beirut and is kidnapped by Hezbollah — 'That group is fanatical, unstable and unpredictable' — and then executed. It's a shame because that very day he was planning to rendezvous in Venice with Vanessa, expressly to 'make a baby'. On the bright side, after his death Vanessa becomes guardian to little Helena, so acquiring a child after all, in a way.

Unlike dim novels by men, so frequently dedicated to free-floating fantasies of fight- ing and sex, many dim novels by women retain a grasp on the great realities of life, however ersatz everything else in their fic- tional worlds may be. The central subjects remain the choice of a mate, the rearing of children, the conflict between generations — all those main events which so many men appear, in their fiction at least, to be so little engaged by.

Even in the almost completely bogus world of Barbara Taylor Bradford, there remains this tug of gravity. In almost every interview, she has talked about being child- less after suffering a miscarriage in her thirties: a grief which has undoubtedly informed her fiction. On the other hand, she's also talked a lot about her bereave- ment when her lapdog, Gemmy, died.

Catherine Cookson has endured truly extraordinary difficulties in her life. Born illegitimate in Jarrow, she grew up believ- ing that her alcoholic mother was her sister. Suffering from an inherited blood disease, she had four miscarriages and she too has no children. She only began to write after a protracted breakdown. For the last ten years, she has been bed-ridden, but her productivity has hardly slackened.

In a weird new audiobook (Catherine Cookson: Her Way, Corgi Audio, £8.99.), Cookson, now 90, says simply: 'Now my end is nearly here and I couldn't go out more pleased.' She also actually sings `My Way' — a tape she made at home, unaccompanied, when she was 79, now sup- plied with a syrupy backing track. It'll not replace the Sid Vicious version.

If a little psychological realism still peeps through a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel, Catherine Cookson's stories are nothing but harsh truths. She obsessively revisits a few archetypal scenes, full of pain, violent jealousy and incestuous desire. They trans- late the material of Greek tragedy to Tyne- side. To anybody who knows these books, the promotion of Catherine Cookson Country seems about as appropriate as would be the promotion of House of Atreus Country.

In The Bonny Dawn, she observes the unities even, It begins at four in the morn- ing. Brid Stevens slips out of bed to watch the dawn over the Northumbrian coast with her new boyfriend, Joe Lloyd, quite inno- cently. But on going back home for break- fast, she is beaten with a dog chain by her jealous father. It emerges that she is actual- ly .the daughter of another man, a neigh- bour, John Palmer — whose son, Sandy, Brid's half-brother, is also obsessively jeal- ous of her.

Joe and Brid have arranged to meet at the beach again that afternoon for a swim. But the elementally evil Sandy Palmer catches Joe there and not only crucifies him between two trees, but also, with his gang, sexually tortures him with a lighted cigarette, until they are disturbed by Brid's own arrival. In a final confrontation, both families gather by the sea and the truths of their relationships come out. Sandy Palmer tries to drown Joe but is swept away him- self, with the blessing of his disgusted father. Joe and Brid are left to build their lives together. A violent handing on between the generations has been com- pressed into a single day.

At 90, Cookson is rehearsing her primal scenes yet again (she herself nearly drowned as a girl). Although the story seems utter nonsense when put into other words, she tells it with fierce conviction and considerable skill too. For some years, she has had to dictate her writing and the style has become even more that of the spoken voice: a form of balladeering.

Like most bestseller manufacturers, Bar- bara Taylor Bradford has packed her fic- tion with clunky facts, secondhand observation, hapless travelogue. In Cather- ine Cookson's novel, there is some period setting: Jiving has just come in, Brid rejoic- es in the new luxury of a bathroom. But the sources of the story are wholly internal. Catherine Cookson Country exists all right — but entirely in her mind. Her novels are a true mythology and she is a true writer.