The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Jilly Cooper on football? She knows about studs
The 86-year-old shoots and scores in this sporting bonkbuster
TACKLE! by Jilly Cooper 448pp, Bantam, T £18.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£22, ebook £10.99
There’s a reason Jilly Cooper has so many devotees. Every one of her 10 previous Rutshire Chronicles has hit the spot. The loathsome baddies, whether they’re greasy bullies or ghastly nouveaux riches, get their comeuppance; the broken hearts find each other, often after a dreadful tragedy; and, love him or loathe him, Rupert Campbell-Black always wins.
There’s a snobbery about this genre of book, dismissed as “bonkbusters” or “chick lit”. But to overlook them is to miss out: they offer huge pleasure. I felt my mood perceptibly improve over the few days of reading Tackle!, wondering what would happen next and hoping, above all, that Jilly wouldn’t let me down with an unsatisfying – still less an unhappy – ending.
Tackle! is set in the world of football, rather than polo or opera, so it’s out with Billy Lloyd-Foxe and Galena Belvedon, and in with Barry Pitt, Feral Jackson and Facundo Gonzales. The plot sees Rupert Campbell-Black take a break from training race horses to buy, at the insistence of his wife Taggie and daughter Bianca, Searston Rovers FC. With the kind of determination that only an Olympic show-jumping gold medal can instil, he sets his sights on winning the Premier League, whilst the players largely concern themselves with wifeswapping. Tackle! melds the underdog tale of Welcome to Wrexham with the upbeat joy of Ted Lasso, and Cooper takes the same cheerful approach as those TV shows to making football and its terminology understandable – even to an ignoramus such as me.
Her characters, as always, are strongly drawn, willing to say whatever they like – in Tackle!, much of this comes through punning or football chants, or both – and to screw whomever they please. (To my slight disappointment, there’s less of this than in Cooper’s previous books, but as she points out, she’s now 86.) The Cotchester locals live the high life to a splendidly exaggerated degree. Their plates are laden with smoked salmon and caviar; their champagne gushes forth in bucketloads; they drench themselves in Diorissimo. The women, who may be on the sidelines of the pitch but certainly aren’t side characters, are busy breaking bedsprings as much as the men.
Tackle! harks back to a time before cancel culture occurred to anybody – though it’s invoked, at one point, as a plot device to flatten a sex-mad villain at an awards ceremony. Otherwise, though Cooper’s cast now have iPhones and Instagram, they’ve refused to moderate how they’ve behaved since 1985, when Riders first came out. Hands sit absentmindedly on thighs (generally when a dress is cut to the groin) or on breasts (when it’s cut to the navel); drink-driving is a county-wide necessity; and Rupert’s stable lass, “Lou-Easy”, makes an energetic return to form.
Cooper’s plots often include outsiders entering the largely white, aristocratic world of Rutshire. From the conductor Rannaldini in Score! to Argentinian players in Polo, the foreigners have long been represented with full phonetic hamminess, and Tackle! is no exception. Facundo Gonzales, the star player, screams “You leetle sheet”, while Marketa, a Czech stable hand, shops at “Vaitrose”. Closer to home, but nonetheless outsiders too, after their difficult upbringings, are young players such as Dolphy or Feral, who chirp things such as “Fank you, Mr Rupert”.
But outsider or not, character always shines through. If they’re a good egg, they’ll be fine. Class boundaries are melted by personality and likeability: the double-barrelled “darlings” live in happy harmony with the Wag-y “babes”. In another Cooper hallmark, tragedy strikes the cast around Searston Rovers. Yet nobody wallows in self-pity; good things happen to the deserving people (and dogs). If only real life were as just.
The only problem with Tackle! is that you have to ration yourself or you’ll gobble it up in one go. Once I finished I felt bereft, no longer able to look forward to a cheerful night at the Dog and Trumpet with the Searston team, or Taggie’s cosy Aga fare of shepherd’s pie and chocolate tart. Still, I’ve easily remedied that – I’ve simply started the entire series again from the top.