In leafy northwest London, Joseph Connolly is a true local celebrity. Not one of the famous actor-slash-models who have bought in to the area, but the real thing: an original bohemian Hampstead-ite who earned his credentials running the Flask Bookshop, sporting a lavish grey beard and flowing locks and writing the eccentric, polemical restaurant column in the Hampstead and Highgate Express. He has also published more than 20 books including several top-selling novels.
Being a well-loved if well-worn part of NW3’s furniture, he is generally allowed to be as outspoken and untrendy as he wishes, which can be both a blessing and a curse for his readers. One imagines he is not easy to edit, his stock-in-trade being the chatty stream-of-consciousness extravaganza.
His latest novel, Style, is no exception. Over 500 pages, different voices weave the sorry tale of Alexander, a handsome ten-year-old boy who has, much to the delight of his mother and the horror of his father, become a famous fashion model with a bevy of tweenage girls camping outside the family home.
Alexander’s rabidly ambitious mum Amy delineates her plan for his mega-stardom with increasingly unhinged passion. Amy’s friend Dolly is from the wrong side of the tracks, living in the area only by dint of her bloke Damien running the garage in a local, gentrified mews. Dolly yearns for the sparkly watches and designer handbags of her neighbours, and wishes her doltish son Kenny could be more like Alexander. This poor family are the kind of rude mechanics Connolly has obviously overheard on the bus, only their extraordinary “lor-lumme”-ing suggests that he might be getting a little hard of hearing (and how many boys in 2015 are called Kenny?).
Although giving a worthwhile outsider view of the privileged entitlement of wealthy Londoners, Dolly speaks in a bizarre faux-cockney patois that is almost impossible to follow, which is a shame because it is she who tells the real story about class and the desire for that elusive quality, “style”. She also carries the plot, as she gets caught up in her dream world of glamour thanks to a chance meeting with a mysterious gentleman. But Dolly says things like “everything what I ever wanted in the whole of my life — it all right here, in this flat . . . What yesterday I never even knowed it exist” [sic] and “she all la-di-da in her ways, like, and me the way I is”. Harry Enfield at his best couldn’t whip up a cornier Steptoe-style patter.
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Which is not to say the posh characters don’t talk funny too. The most Connolly-like figure, Alexander’s father Terence (middle class, loves nice furniture, gets furious with yobs on the bus) has his own brand of hard-on-the-ear dialogue, as indeed does his wife, a typical example being “Although I quite freely admit it would be something of an exaggeration . . . well, in truth, it would be rather more akin to nothing less than total fabrication to suggest that thus far into my thinking, I have formulated anything that might even in a very dim light indeed be passed off sensibly as an actual plan.”
Persevere through these suffocatingly overwritten pages and, like a magic-eye illusion, there emerges briefly a perfect little story: a clear and true meditation on the pitfalls of wanting stylish things. Through Alexander’s rise and inevitable fall, those around him gain and lose a whole Selfridges’-worth of Cartier, Eames and Hermès; a Scott’s’-worth of Mersault and lobster salad. The trinket-loving Dolly gets a chance at tasting all this and it makes her truly happy. Amy’s obsession leaves her bloodstained and humiliated. Terence the design-junkie, after losing his beautiful objets d’art, concludes “if there’s a moral to be learned here . . . well then it stubbornly eludes me”. Readers of this baggy, unshaven and rather snobbish novel may be inclined to agree.
Style by Joseph Connolly, Quercus, 489pp; £19.99. To buy this book for £16.49, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134