(courtesy Hachette Australia)
There is an idea that if you’re writing an escapist story, then it must be purely froth and confection, its fairytale heart untroubled by the real issues of the world.
And while, yes, a healthy amount of reality-defying escapism is just what the mental health-enhancing doctor ordered, many of the more emotionally robust members of the genre benefit from the injection of some real world angst and drama.
Far from gutting the escapist elements, it actually serves to enhance them and make them feel more grounded and impactful and, ultimately, moving.
Case in point is A Merry Little Christmas by Cathy Bramley, a follow-up to earlier novels, Merrily Ever After and The Merry Christmas Project which feature at their heart the lovely Derbyshire village of Wetherly and the titular protagonist Merry who, in keeping with many a festive romance novel, has a very seasonal name.
But while Merry may have found love and belonging at the most wonderful time of the year on more than one occasion and be the nominative distillation of the season, she’s facing some real challenges as we begin A Merry Little Christmas, most related to the fact that she is heavily pregnant and close to having the family she’s always dreamed of with husband Cole.
She appears to have it all, or about to get that anyway, but as the novel starts, she is terrified of being a mother, her worry driven by being abandoned by her mother who killed herself when Merry was a child.
While other girls had watched and learned from their mums from an early age, she’d [Merry] been shunted from house to house, children’s home to children’s home, after her own mother hadn’t loved her enough to stay alive.
Merry was going to make a terrible mother; she just knew it. How could she be anything else?
If Merry’s mum didn’t have the mothering instincts that should have compelled her, in her daughter’s mind at least, to hang around, then what hope does Merry have of being the mother she’s always wanted to be?
But she can’t share her surging fears with her BFF of some twenty years, Nell, because she’s struggling with fertility issues which mean that while Merry is close to having her child, any hope of Nell having a kid with husband Olek, is distant at best, impossible at worst.
The stark difference between childbearing journeys is slowly but surely driving a wedge between the two, which is not only a problem in and of itself, but because the two are partners in the candle store Merry started some years earlier, which is coming into its busy season and needs all the focus it can get if its to make the most of this seasonal purple patch.
There is, then, a lot burbling away beneath the surface, and then out in the open, and at the time of year when popular culture suggests you should be roasting chestnuts on an open fire, and riding in sleighs across snowy fields, Merry and Nell are headed for a massive bust up, taking many of their friends and family within them.
Sounds hugely festive does it? The stuff of Santa and eggnog-laced dreams?
Not quite, and to be fair, it’s not meant to be because this is not an escapist rom-com novel which exists solely in a sparkly fairy lights and tinsel-draped world.
(courtesy official Cathy Bramley Facebook page)
That’s not to say there isn’t a fair amount of warmth and goodwill around, and lord knows, that people like Cole and Olek, both men on their second marriages who have found true, TRUE love the second time around, don’t give fostering a festive mindset a red-hot go, but A Merry Little Christmas is primarily focused on what happens when two besties find themselves at loggerheads at a time of year when the Christmas PR machine suggests you should be wrapped in seasonal bliss.
But that’s remotely realistic is it?
I mean, everyone wants a perfect, cosy, all the escapist bells and whistles Christmas, but not everyone gets that, in fact, a great many people don’t, and it’s in this yawning chasm between pop culture perfection and the sometimes cruel realities of the season that A Merry Little Christmas sits.
Not always comfortably, it should be added; while the novel is a mostly well-told affair, with solid characterisation and a storyline that hums along at a fair, emotionally solid pace, it sometimes feels a little sudsy and overwrought, with Merry in particular, somewhat unfairly, turned into an ungrateful so-and-so who can’t see how good she’s got it.
While she has some real moments of clarity and emotional honesty, many times she’s an overblown, angry and often ungratefully nasty caricature who treats people around like a cyclone of rapacious selfishness that wants, wants, WANTS.
She [Merry] was going to do it; she’d send a few words to say how the funeral had gone and how much Nell was missed. She opened her bag, took out her phone and stared at the screen with joy. Because on it were the words she’d longed to see: missed call from Nell.
Thanks heavens. Thank heavens for that.
Rationally, you can understand where Bramley is going with this, and that Merry is the product of fears and neuroses run amuck, and as anyone who has struggled with emotional PTSD, especially derived from trauma, knows, that can enact a heavy toll.
You are certainly not in your right mind when it’s at its worst, and you can, like Merry does, do and say some terrible things you then regret.
But while A Merry Little Christmas is a mostly solidly enjoyable read, snug within a genre is generously acknowledges without being wholly derivative of, Merry feels much of the time like a wildly overblown and thoroughly unpleasant protagonist for whom it’s a struggle to have much empathy.
You feel far more for Nell, who is far from perfect either, and makes some questionable life calls in the midst of some major revelations about her and Olek, largely because while she goes big on the current trauma too, she still feels like a reasonably likeable person and someone you want to spend an entire Christmas novel with.
Still, while Merry does test your tolerance quite a bit, and perhaps if you’ve read the two earlier books, much of this emotional extremism will be better understood – for the record, this reviewer picked this novel unaware it was a continuance of a series though, to be fair, it works very well as a standalone novel with Bramley seamlessly catching you up on the story so far – A Merry Little Christmas by and large works a festive rom-com with real emotional heft.
While many of the major plot lines feel like they may not be resolved in a seasonally satisfying way by book’s end, you know in your heart that A Merry Little Christmas won’t leave you or the characters out in the literal and emotional cold come Christmas Day and that the magic of the season will do its thing and hearts will be mended, scars will be healed and the wonder, love and hope will do just as pop culture demands and make everything right with the world again.