I’ve written before that digital communication dealt a blow to conventional thriller writing. The example I used was the murder mystery set in a remote location – in the nineteenth century the villain could just cut the phone lines and plunge the other characters into isolation. These days broadband is everywhere, so the characters could easily call for help. (The art of comedy is still reeling from this as well – if you rewatch classic sitcoms like Frasier or Friends you will notice how much of the story hinges on landlines and answering machines. The gods of laughter must have wept at the passing of the analogue age.)
The wedding that is the centrepiece of Beautiful People takes place in high summer on the Falmouth coast with a beach theme. But, because the bride and groom are public figures, they have signed an exclusive magazine deal for the wedding photos – meaning no one else, guests or staff, are allowed to take photos. ‘Hence,’ the invitation stipulates, ‘we will be politely requesting that phones are handed over on arrival.’
No smartphones. And suddenly the sunlit hotel feels like the craggy castle with its line down.
Beautiful People has a great deal of darkness even before we get to the wedding. The protagonist Victoria ‘Vix’ Fisher has been running all her life – first from a traumatic small town family background, then from a rape suffered during her first year at a London university, following which she fled to France. Twenty five years later, Vix is living in Marseille and is making some kind of living as an artist. Her work gets noticed by film star Ingrid Olsson who commissions Vix to paint her portrait and then to unveil it at the Falmouth wedding… to a man Vix knew in London. By this circuitous route Vix is drawn back into the wealthy milieu she had known at university.
The prospect of meeting people you knew years ago is always potentially apprehensive, and Amanda Jennings splices Vix’s unwilling journey to the wedding with flashbacks to her gradual entry into the long ago posh student scene. In both time frames Vix starts out reluctant. She was initially shy in London, conscious of being a working class northern student outshone by the trust fund boarding-school crowd. Some of Vix’s contemporaries are nice people, others are sociopaths. As Vix grows used to her new surroundings, she becomes more designing and amoral. She too has the power to dazzle. She too is one of the beautiful people.
The campus scenery and student drama in Jennings’s novel rings true. The interpersonal crosscurrents of Vix’s nineties youth are thrown into relief by her rage and trauma and it’s horrifying to watch her life fall apart. At her most vjvid Vix is like Liberty in the Delacroix painting, trampling corpses. Jennings’s little touches such as the lucky white pebble and Coco’s parallel beach friend are particularly deft.
Like many young people the 1990s version of Vix has a fixed idea of what the world is like. Vix made a living in the 2000s drawing caricatures on the tourist strip, and has a habit of seeing new people in terms of how she would caricature them, what features to draw out, forehead or nose or lips or eyes.
But Jennings does not caricature. The novel is not a simple story of the working class hero teaching the prep-school boys a lesson. It’s about truly getting to know people and that good and evil can cross currents of class. That is why the happy ending felt so earned and so deserved. And why the sinister parts of the novel felt so unexpected and scary. I found the reveal of the guest list’s ultimate villain to be a complete surprise.
Max Dunbar 