The world is as strange as it’s ever been, but Marian Keyes brought a smidgen of comfort today when she told Good Morning Britain that she was writing a sequel to Rachel’s Holiday.
I think the original, in which Rachel Walsh comes to terms with the fact she’s a drug addict, is Keyes’ best novel. In an interview around publication of The Mystery of Mercy Close, which is about the youngest Walsh sister, fierce Helen, Keyes told me it still rankled that “one journalist, I remember her name … described Rachel’s Holiday as forgettable froth”.
“It’s not”, she said. “It’s quite brutal. I thought it was a serious book. A comic book, but it was still a book about addiction and recovery.”
Following Rachel as she slowly acknowledges she might have a little more than a “strictly recreational” drug habit, the novel is utterly hilarious, deeply romantic (Luke Costello, ah my fluttering heart) and desperately moving.
News of a sequel set 20 years later, about “how her life has been with Luke and all the things that have happened”, does make me slightly nervous. Last time I read one about a much-loved character, it was Jilly Cooper’s Mount!, which once again starred Rupert Campbell-Black, these days married to the delightful Taggie. But Rupert’s reappearance did not live up to the joys of Riders, Rivals and Polo – he is tempted off the straight and narrow by the “grieving but ravishing Zimbabwean widow” Gala, and honestly, I could hardly bear it. Scales fallen, indeed.
I mean, of course I’ll read whatever Keyes writes: sequels are one of my things. And Keyes herself is wary of pitfalls, telling Good Morning Britain: “If I do a bad job of this, I feel like I’d be destroying not only the book I’m writing, but also the previous book.”
“I don’t know if you’ve ever read the sequel of a book you’ve loved, and very often the sequel just doesn’t give you the same happy feels of the first book,” she said. “When that happens to me, I not only dislike the sequel, I then start to side-eye the original book and think, was it really that good in the first place? You know there’s a lot to be damaged here, but I’m going into it and I’m enjoying it, and it’s really lovely to connect to all the Walsh family.”
The Guardian
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