Some readers might give Amazon the benefit of the doubt and congratulate them for perfectly categorising the brilliant Britishness of Jilly Cooper: bang in the middle ground between rough sex and jokes. Gags and gags, if you will. Qualifying simultaneously for the genres of BDSM and sports humour might mean she is truly “seen” – but that doesn’t explain being 27th in “Western & Frontier Romance”. Literally every other book in the category has a cowboy on the cover.
All in all, it’s not quite Dewey Decimal, is it?
So I suggest you abandon Amazon, buy Rivals from your local bookshop if you’re planning to read it, but first tune in with all haste to its TV adaptation, which is the most entertaining thing to have been on television since… well, since Keir Starmer called the hostages “sausages”, about two weeks ago, but apart from that ages.
I am looking forward to each new episode with tremendous glee. The first two minutes alone delivered Concorde, bums and David Tennant, and if that’s not what you want out of television then I can’t help you. It’s light yet powerful, silly yet captivating; a pastiche of the era in which it was written, yet astonishingly somehow sincere at the same time. It’s parodic but not, thank God, ironic – done with a twinkle rather than an actual wink. It is magnificently true to the spirit of Dame Jilly herself, right down to the bucolic descriptions of cow parsley and flowering hawthorn with which she always, unapologetically, dresses her skulduggery and humping.
The performances are uniformly delightful. Who knew that Danny Dyer and Katherine Parkinson would make such a great couple? David Tennant, of course, can make anything dazzle. I’d watch him wait for a bus.