Sitcom star’s raunchy debut
by Ruth Jones Bantam Press, £12.99 IT is 1985 and Kate Andrews is a 22-year-old aspiring actress, doing shifts in an Edinburgh pub to stay afloat financially.
There she meets married teacher Callum MacGregor, 17 years her senior. They embark on a passionate and increasingly reckless affair which is eventually uncovered – and finished – by Callum’s wife Belinda.
Belinda reluctantly agrees to take Callum back and together they watch their three children grow up.
Kate is broken-hearted, left with an emotional legacy from which she will never recover.
Fast-forward to 2002 and Kate is now a highly successful film and TV actress, recognised wherever she goes. She is also married to the supportive and long-suffering Matt who copes with her emotional highs and lows and is the chief carer of their small daughter Tallulah.
But on a trip back to her Edinburgh primary school to mark its centenary, Kate encounters Callum, now its deputy head. Their romance is reignited and spirals dangerously out of control with even more at stake than first time around. The consequences are predictably disastrous.
There is also a sub-plot about Matt’s likeable university friend Hetty who has also spent the past 17 years obsessed with an unobtainable man, the obnoxious Adam Latimer. Although Hetty and Kate are very different in every way, both are blinded by what they believe to be love.
As the action switches back and forth between 1985 and 2002, it is hard to feel much sympathy for or indeed interest in Kate. She is a monster of egoism and selfishness and prepared to ride roughshod over the feelings of those who she supposedly holds dear.
This is the first novel from Ruth Jones, co-writer and star of Gavin & Stacey.
Those who enjoyed the gentle social satire and wit of that series might want to think twice about picking up Never Greener. This bonkbuster lacks Gavin & Stacey’s charm and credibility and the writing is in places clunking and clichéd, as the title suggests. The grass on the other side is never greener. “It’s still grass.”
So if you are looking for careful plotting and character development, rather than page after page of graphically described sex, then you may want to try elsewhere.