Book Review- Funny Girl

Funny
Girl

Nick
Hornby

(Penguin,
2015)

In the past I have often struggled with the novels of Nick Hornby, his
skill as a writer has always been evident, but his chosen subject
matter, the decade long whine that brackets the millennium has tended
to become grating.

As a result my enthusiasm for this his first novel with a non
contemporary setting was not high, thankfully it was good enough to
first surprise and then delight this sceptical reader.

The story of how not so plain Barbara from Blackpool becomes, via a
change of name to Sophie Straw and a stint working in a department
store, the star of a hit TV show as London starts to swing in the
early sixties could have been an exercise in nostalgia. Instead
Hornby makes it into a touching and often genuinely funny book about
love, friendship, class, change and the failings that make us human.

It is impossible not to be moved by how Sophie and her fellow crew
members are first bound together by their sudden success and the
sense of being rebels challenging a tired establishment; then pulled
apart as innocence changes first into experience and the regret.

Hornby also captures perfectly the shabby gentility of London at the start
of the sixties and the institutional awkwardness of a BBC struggling
to escape from its Rethian straitjacket. Outside the capital of
course the rest of the country didn't so much swing as sway ever so
slightly, this was still the Britain of three piece suits, half day
closing, gentlemen v players, cigarettes and twitching net curtains.

Many of the funniest and most affecting scenes in the book are rooted in
the culture clashes that result as Sophie's provincial relatives and
the more middle class and, naturally, repressed ones of her fellow
cast members struggle to understand the confusing sensibilities of
this brave new world.

There are some problems with the book, but these can be laid at the door of
the publisher rather than its author. For some reason known only to
their marketing department Penguin have decided to pepper the text
with photographs of sixties London, these may be interesting in their
own right, but hardly add to the reading experience. Neither do a
couple of pieces taken from Len Deighton's London Dossier tacked on at the end, taken as a whole this seems like so much
unnecessary padding.

Minor dissatisfactions about the form it takes shouldn't detract from the
enjoyment to be found in a novel that splendidly fulfils its function
of reminding readers just what a foreign place our own country was
not so long ago.