(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Christmas tales are, by and large, all about transformation and redemption.
At what is styled at the most wonderful time of the year, everything is supposed to be possible and that includes giving a festive glow-up to lives that have languished and sorrowed in the other 11 months of the year and which are desperately in need of some tinsel-clad epiphanic reinvention.
The good news is that Ally Bunbury’s Christmas-set novel, All Wrapped Up embraces this idea passionately, sending its wayward protagonist, the rather appropriately named Holly away from London, where’s she just broken off her engagement to the very lovely, sweet and wholly dependable (but dull) Giles, off to a remote country home in Ireland in the first couple of chapters.
Boom! Engagement broken, Holly’s upset but knows she’s done the right thing – because even though Giles is filthy rich, a decent human being and caring as hell, he isn’t right for her; think Sleepless in Seattle and you have the vibe at work here – and believes that helping fading member of the landed gentry, Serena Karpur, will be her ticket to a whole new meaningful life.
She, of course, does this, six weeks before Christmas and so, when we meet her she’s in the throes of trying to clean out Serena’s dilapidated estate, Knockboden, all while doing her best to avoid any mention of Christmas which Holly, namesake festive accoutrement be damned, does not like at all.
Holly crossed the street. Perhaps as a punishment for her ‘bah-humbug’ thoughts, as she approached the filthy Land Rover, she slipped in her wellies on a build-up of slush. In slow motion, she watched her legs go flying in front of her. By some miracle, holding up her hands, she managed to hold on to both the port and the vodka without damage. Talk about hitting rock bottom.
This, naturally enough, means that not only will Christmas come roaring at her like a bunch of fevered carollers aiming to work their work volubly through the season’s entire musical canon, but that her life will change in ways she doesn’t think she wants and at a speed that will ensure she’s loved up and happier than she’s ever been by Christmas day itself.
All loving up will come courtesy of glamorous, recklessly indulgent but deliciously fun Serena’s son, Tyrone who, in stark contrast to the fading grandeur of his ancestral home and his mother’s penury, is loaded thanks to a banking career in New York which has left him worth squillions and able to step in to fix the many broken things at Knockboden.
He is exasperated at his mother’s rampant spending of money she doesn’t have, and none too pleased that Holly is there to make the place shipshape for its next incarnation as a destination for holidaying honeymooners, but after some sniping here and there and stomping around in a huff, he gets onboard with the whole idea of reinventing his childhood home, little realising that he and Holly will find themselves drawn together and wholly changed right along with it.
The thing about All Wrapped Up is that it does not stray far from the expected course of any Christmas novel (or film for that matter) and delivers up all the romance and renewal you’d expect, all tied up with a decorative zest that sees a tired old manor become a festive place of hope, love and all that things that every major character, most notably Tyrone and Holly, have lacked to date.
(courtesy official Ally Bunbury Facebook page)
It’s all wondrously lovely and effervescently confected, a Christmas fairytale for the ages that proves, once again, that all a broken life needs is the perspective of the time of the year when the world feels a lot more alive with possibility and magical hope that it does otherwise.
The only downside is that in the rush to get Holly and Tyrone together, All Wrapped Up sometimes arrives at points with little development or real meaningful human interaction.
It’s not a fatal flaw, and honestly when you’re being served up a happier ending this all-encompassing, who wants to quibble on how you get there, but sometimes you do feel like steps have been missed and moments left out and that Holly and Tyrone have gone from sniping adversaries (even though when they first meet he is nothing but nice to her) to lovers perhaps a little too fast.
Still, on the great law of festive averages, All Wrapped Up does tick all the right boxes, giving us a protagonist in need of something new and better, a would-be suitor with the means to do that both as a decent human being and a wealthy individual, a fading woman clinging to the love and glamour of yesteryear with devil-may-care wit and fabulousness, and a narrative that offers the requisite weaving of the magic wand of Christmas reimagining that may see some setbacks but which we all know will ultimately prevail.
‘But, it doesn’t mean there’s anything going on.’
‘Who says?’ Lynette’s eyes lit up.
‘I say, and anyway, I’m here to work, this is my job.’
‘Maybe Insta-Love is contagious,’ said Lynette. ‘Just as well we didn’t skimp on the mistletoe, then, isn’t it.’
And honestly, it’s that prevailing against all odds that makes novels like All Wrapped Up such a welcome and necessary read for many people.
They stare down the grim injustice and hopelessness of a world that not only often feels drab but looks unappealing too, and propose that along with the baubles, garlands and twinkling lights, that some existential sprucing up is possible too.
It’s a beguiling idea that the prettiness of the season begets a beautiful zhooshing of the soul, and while the cynical disengaged part of us may laugh at the idea, the rest of us embraces it fulsomely and without reserve, happy that while the reality of the world would suggest nothing much will change between 1 December and the magic day of the 25th, novels like All Wrapped Up enthusiastically and without reserve say it most definitely will.
That’s part of the reason why many of us love Christmas so much, and why books like All Wrapped Up are so attractive – they barrack for the idea that life can change and get better and that it can do augmented by all the loveliness, vigour, colour and fun of a season that pays to heed to what is practical or rational but which thrives on the idea that life can be as magically wonderful as you want it to be and all you need is the right time of year and sparkling setting.
All Wrapped Up may not completely hit the mark but it mostly gets there, offering a fun – Serena particularly is an absolute hoot and completely worth the price of admission – look at Christmas romance and some much-needed reassurance that no matter how dark things might look, they are not doomed to stay that way forever and will change if you just open your heart at the most deck-the-halled time of the yer ever.