 | While lamenting her passing, it was a cause for much celebration among admirers of Catherine Cookson that there were to be nine posthumous novels. While it's clear that these books would have been different had she lived to revise them, there is no question that the latest, Rosie of the River, is a highly accomplished and involving piece of work. All the skill at sympathetic characterisation and beguiling plotting that made her the world's most successful writer of romantic fiction is here aplenty. Sally Carpenter, worried by her husband Fred's suggestion that they should undertake a boating trip on the Norfolk Broads, is reluctantly persuaded, and the couple set off with their bull terrier Bill in their boat, Dogfish Three. Sally was right to be worried: lying in wait for them is a catalogue of disasters that make the holiday a fraught experience. All is redeemed, though, when they are befriended by the boating fraternity and come into contact with 15-year-old Rosie, whose chequered family history quickly has them involved with her problems. The couple decides to help Rosie in her attempts to improve her lot, and then have to come to terms with Rosie falling in love. In many ways, this is something of a departure for Cookson, with centre stage being claimed by the resilient boating couple Sally and Fred (although Rosie becomes a central character who is realised quite as fully as the older characters), and if the travails of the couple have a striking ring of authenticity, that is no doubt because Cookson utilised her own experience of boating on the Norfolk Broads with her husband Tom to create the background for her charming tale. This time, the suffering that her heroines are usually forced to endure is underplayed in favour of a narrative that makes its effects gently (but as persuasively as one could wish). The eponymous Rosie is a delightful character (as, amusingly, is Bill, the terrier), and the narrative keeps us inexorably turning the pages: The river had widened and looked bleak and forbidding; posts, black and dripping green slime, reared up out of the rain-spangled water, which no longer appeared like a river: its width spoke of the sea. She went and stood by her husband, and he, taking his eyes from the windscreen, smiled at her. However, she did not return the smile for there, ahead, forever ahead it seemed, were posts. --Barry Forshaw |
