My second Sue Townsend book of the year and, thinking about it, my first non-Adrian-Mole Townsend read. I found this in the charity section at the front of Tesco a few weeks ago. I didn’t even know this one existed.
The Coventry of the title isn’t the city but a housewife- Coventry Makin. She narrates half the chapters in a droll and extremely funny first-person narrative. The rest of the book is in standard third person and follows the various members of the supporting cast around, her children, her brother, her parents, the in-laws and the policemen tracking her.
She has committed a murder. She tells us this in the opening paragraph, which is one of the greatest openings I think I’ve read in many years.
“1. Yesterday I Killed a Man
There are two things you should know about me immediately: the first is that I am beautiful, the second that yesterday I killed a man called Gerald Fox. Both were accidents. My parents are not good-looking. My father looks like a tennis ball, bald and round, and my mother closely resembles a bread knife, thin, jagged and with a cutting tongue. I have never liked them, and I suspect they don’t like me.”
That truly sets the scene for the story and the tone of the storytelling. Indeed, in the chapters that follow her parents, they’re referred to as Tennis Ball and Breadknife.
She lives a life of tedium, with a boring husband and two teenage children not far off flying the nest. After killing Gerald, she goes on the run and finds herself penniless and living rough on the streets of London. From this rock bottom, she starts to rebuild her life (admittedly through a series of unlikely encounters.
It’s by turns hilariously funny and genuinely quite moving. Coventry is a brilliantly drawn protagonist, and the supporting cast are all perfect, even if some of them are very broad stereotypes. I particularly liked the family she works for briefly in the middle of the book.
She manages to capture a microcosm of Thatcherite Britain and pins it to the page with shocking accuracy. This is a great satire on 80s Britain as much as it is a feminist tale of a woman escaping a life of drudgery.
I recommend it to anyone that likes their comedy with a dramatic edge and a sharp sense of sarcasm.
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