Daily Mail

BEST BOOKS ON... BUSY BODIES

- Gill Hornby

THE bestsellin­g author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life. IT USED to be rather hard work being a busybody — you had to do a lot of snooping and gossiping before you could properly interfere. Social media has lightened the load somewhat.

Our neighbours still get up to stuff behind their net curtains, but now they post a selfie of it straight after. We invade our own privacy so others don’t have to. But that doesn’t stop them meddling and judging. Indeed, it encourages them. Now it’s so easy, we’ve got busybodies galore.

Mrs Gamart, though, is of the more old-fashioned variety. In Penelope Fitzgerald’s utterly delightful The Bookshop, she rules her cut-off coastal Suffolk town with an iron fist. Enter Florence Green, a quiet widow with the inoffensiv­e ambition of opening a little bookshop.

Unfortunat­ely, her business plan did not reckon on Mrs Gamart, who sets about scheming to get her own way. Fitzgerald captures perfectly the delicate power balance of a small community, and the damage one strong person can wreak.

In Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple’s strange and charming heroine has more than one busybody to deal with. She is a misunderst­ood genius, not cut out for domestic life, who finds herself a stay-at-home mum in Seattle having to cope with her neighbours as well as the other mothers at her daughter’s pushy school.

Audrey, the woman next door, is a villain with her constant criticisin­g and underminin­g. Unable to stand up to her, Bernadette dumps both daughter and husband and flees.

Believe me, I did try to think of a male busybody in fiction, but didn’t get very far. It seems to be a horrible female stereotype, and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is its blueprint.

The elderly, inquisitiv­e resident of St Mary Mead — in novels such as The Murder At The Vicarage — has an insatiable appetite for the business of others. But her nosiness is of the most positive sort: she solves crimes, and where she lives there’s plenty of them. She’s a role model for busybodies everywhere.

 ??  ??
 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom