Jilly Cooper, queen of the British bonkbuster, has turned her attention to football for her 18th novel. She was inspired after sitting next to Sir Alex Ferguson at lunch one day. She also thanks Kenny Dalglish, Alan Curbishley and ‘my wonderful neighbour’ Tony Adams in her acknowledgements. Her friend, the former home secretary Michael Howard, even took her to a Liverpool match, where she met Steven Gerrard.
Her legions of fans need not worry, however. We are still in Rutshire, the village Cooper created for her earlier novels; Rupert Campbell-Black, the hero of Riders, Rivals and Mount!, who was allegedly partly modelled on Andrew Parker Bowles, still lives in Penscombe Court, ‘his beautiful, gold Queen Anne house’; and he is still ‘Nirvana to most women’, but now in his sixties and distraught over his wife Taggie’s breast cancer. Cooper should be commended for the poignancy of her portrayal of Taggie’s treatment and recovery, which – given the cartoonish nature of her novels – gratifyingly goes beyond the clichés of nausea and hair loss.
It is somewhat of a stretch that Rupert, former showjumping champion of the world and massively successful horse trainer, now decides to buy a football club, Searston Rovers, but he does so for Taggie. Their adopted daughter Bianca is living in Australia with her star striker boyfriend, Feral Jackson, and Rupert hopes to sign him for Searston Rovers so that he and Bianca will return home and be closer to Taggie. If the depiction of Feral, who is black and dyslexic with a heroin addict for a mother, troubles you, it’s worth remembering that all of Cooper’s characters are caricatures.
When Cooper mentioned earlier this year at the Cheltenham Festival (the jump-racing rather than the literary one) that the publication of Tackle! had been held up, some assumed this was because of the strictures of sensitivity readers.
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