Maureen Lee

Sunday morning and I'm reading a novelist my Mam has been a fan of for a while.

Maureen Lee is in the tradition of all those wonderful old Catherine Cookson novels... multi-generational sagas which begin with multiple familes and character view-points back in the old two-up two-down terraces, with everyone starving and jostling along through endless hardships. At first it's easy to dismiss it all as just another clogs-and-cobbles job... nicking bits and pieces from every Victorian melodrama going and then suddenly WHAM. I'm hooked. It was true of Catherine Cookson and now it's true of Maureen Lee, whose novels are set on Merseyside, rather than Tyne and Wear.

I'm utterly absorbed in 'Queen of the Mersey.' I'm completely living through the lives of these characters as they tumble through the war years and the fifties. I'm utterly obsessed with poor Queenie, whose tart of a mother beat her and so neglected her that, having chucked her down the stairs, forgot to have her broken arm set properly. Poor resourceful Queenie survives and is taken in by the family downstairs and joins an extended cast of overlapping poor-but-cheery families. We go through the bombing raids and evacuations to Wales; inadvertant murders and infidelities... the whole raft of human experience and emotion. And, to me, none of it feels hackneyed or cliched. None of these great, trundling apparatuses of plotting feel cynically deployed. I feel like Maureen Lee believes totally in her characters and cares desperately about what happens to them. Perhaps this is the difference between really smashing popular fiction and the lesser sort: the author actually caring. (It's the same with any kind of fiction, though. I think the author has to care about what they're doing. It's not always obvious, in some cases, that they do...)

As with precursors in this genre... notably Barbara Bradford Taylor's blockbusting 'Woman of Substance' from donkeys years ago... there has to be the inevitable gaining of immense wealth and all the tribulations that come with it. Queenie (imaginary spoiler space here!) falls in with the owner of Liverpool's fanciest department store, becomes fashion buyer and his mistress. He buys her a boat and they sail off to Greece, and then her raddled old mother turns up on the doorstep after many years' absence. All the details are delicious: the stuffed vineleaves Queenie tries on her Greek sojourn... how she lusts after the sailor in the blue woolly jumper and curls up by the fire to read Gone With the Wind as a storm rages over the island. And her mother's orange frizz of hair atop her manky leopardskin coat. All of these details, and all the specifics of fashion and period detail in the department store are things I find immensely appealing.

All the characters in the large cast are very distinct, too. Through all the complications at the plot level we never lose track or count. This is a great skill to learn, I always think. And when they're all yammering and chatting we're hardly ever in doubt about who is speaking. Another great novelist's skill... and one that's on show very modestly, I think. It's like we're eavesdropping on friends... and that's a lovely recommendation for a book, I think... that the writer can make you feel like that.

It's one of those thick, fruity Christmas cakes of a book. It's about as thick as one, too. The kind that's been made early, stowed away, fed regularly with booze and wrapped up in greaseproof paper to acquire further richness.

To me, this whole genre of saga novel is like visiting relatives. It's like seeing how they were getting on - these aunties and Nanna's, back in the war years, between, before and since. The half-heard stories of extended families, fashioned into a ramshackle plot that makes some kind of emotional sense.

I've just remembered, maybe twenty years ago. Reading a Catherine Cookson of my Mam's, and my Big Nanna was stopping by for tea. 'Ee, that's not a man's book he's reading.' I think I shuddered at the time. I guess she meant I should be reading something about war? Or maybe something more 'literary'? What with me being away at university and all that? Maybe, like many of my peers, I should have been reading Martin Amis, Ian McEwan... all that gaggle of clever-clever boys. Well, I read them and found them to be heartless, narcissistic drips.

I still like a good saga, it turns out.