JOIN USNice Work (If You Can Get it) Celia Imrie
Bloomsbury
2016, pp 393,
Rs. 499
When it’s vacation time everywhere, what can be better for reading than a piece of fiction set in a holiday town! For some reason if one is not able to take a summer break (you poor sod, you!), Celia Imrie’s Nice Work (If You Can Get It) will provide vicarious pleasure with the beautiful setting in the French Riviera.
The author who is better known as an actress of substance with work spanning films, TV, theatre and radio brings her experience in the vocations to populate her book with characters that she can probably identify with.
“Midlife can be such a bore”: Celia Imrie. A few retiree expatriates from various places and of various ages move to France and make a small town near Nice their home. Bellevue-Sur-Mer offers them peace and quiet while being not too far from the glitz of Nice and Monte Carlo and is practically converted into an English county in the French countryside by our protagonists. The halcyon tranquillity is all very well for a while but the hidden entrepreneur in all these mid-lifers gives rise to restlessness and an idea of collectively setting up a café rears up in their minds. They even find an ideal place for their dream café and feverishly go about refurbishing the place and opening it in time for the Cannes film festival that is slated to take place soon. The frayed nerves among the band of friends are a given, considering their different outlooks, bank balances and ideas. Add to that their extended families and friends and acquaintances and it can only mean mayhem. The entry of a mysterious Russian millionaire and ex-television stars and Italian mafia add to the chaos as do spooky and unnerving incidents that happen in the proposed café while renovation is under way. It’s as if someone is trying to send them a sinister message to not go ahead with their plan.
Does their sense of humour and bonding get them through disquieting yet hectic times? What about Sally’s Russian paramour who promises to bankroll their crazy venture? Ex-husbands, boyfriends, children, grandchildren, dead grandmothers, old acquaintances who usurp our characters’ homes: all crawl out of the woodwork to create this work of fiction that is probably as madcap an adventure as the author went through in her film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
The story is indeed full of promise. However, it starts out at a slow pace. There are too many characters, requiring the reader to grasp and put a mental image to. And that takes a while! Once the main characters become identifiable for the story to move along, in come some more minor characters to populate the French Riviera! It’s a task for the reader to connect the dots to each other and figure out who is related to whom and in what way.
The main protagonists are all fraught with uncertainty in the initial phase of the caper but come into their own gradually. Their conversations seem rather bookish. Their personas are not well-etched and they remain what they are: characters in a book.
The latter half of the book reminds one of the comedies of the silent era. Slapstick stuff with the robbers, mafia, gendarmerie, film stars, the rich and the famous all running about helter-skelter. Characters are throwing bread-rolls at each other and dunking melted ice cream on heads. One can almost imagine the tinny background music coming to a crescendo ending with a clash of cymbals! And then all’s well that ends well and the reader too knows it. In that sense, there’s no suspense. Bad men go to prison, loose ends are tied up. All is hunky-dory, old chap. People get jobs. Actors get movies to work in.
Some sections of the tale start with a recipe. But they don’t really add anything to that section or even the whole story as such. Quite redundant! Or maybe the author felt it was necessary to enhance the feel of the book since her characters were setting up a café.
A story that has good potential to be turned into a whacky film! Or an airport/in-flight read!