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Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : A : Astley, Judy
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Judy Astley's Excess Baggage defies categorisation. Is it a literary piece? Or a very funny and sharply written comic novel? Actually, Astley writes the kind of book that creates its own category, as anyone who has read Just for the Summer, Pleasant Vices and Every Good Girl will know all too well. Excess Baggage is quite her most beguiling novel yet, with a range of characterisation and hilarious situations that top even her previous books.Astley's heroine, Lucy, is dreading the "Proper Family Holiday" that is in prospect. She has been struggling as a house painter with an uneventful love life and a 12-year-old daughter when her parents suggest that she forgets about the expired lease on her flat and joins them (along with her surly sister Theresa and vaguely paranoid brother Simon) on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Caribbean. For this, the siblings have been told to bring along children and even au pairs. But what is their parents' agenda? Quickly, the tensions that divide the family at home come bubbling to the surface and, in the course of some fraught situations, Lucy's life is not the only one to be changed irrevocably.
From the opening chapter when Lucy staggers blearily around to the Beatles on the radio (as she stuffs clothes into her hideous puce nylon hold-all) to the brilliantly orchestrated finale featuring (of all things) a hurricane, Astley rarely puts a foot wrong. The reader does not have to be a single mother to identify totally with the beleaguered Lucy, and her squabbling family are equally engaging, however horrible. However, it's Astley's authorial voice that is always sure-footed, such as the passage with Lucy's brother Simon remembering sex in odd places:
...there'd been the boat on the Norfolk Broads, holidaying with Plum's hearty outdoor cousins who were so scrubbed-clean wholesome that Simon had been sure they thought babies were made by some strange practical handicraft as per instructions in a scout manual. It had been almost disappointing to get married and realise that sex was not only permitted but compulsory, and in a safe dull duveted bed.
--Barry Forshaw
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