(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
You have to hand it to romantic comedies (which, by the way, this reviewer adores) – they often have the most outrageously out-there premises that, somehow, in the hands of an accomplished writer, end up feeling grounded and human.
It takes some talent for that to happen but Lizzy Dent, the nom de plume of Australian writer Rebecca Denton, has proven she’s more than up to the task with the inventive delight that is The Summer Job, a novel which centres its entire narrative about one big, enormous lie.
That lie belongs to Birdy, a British woman in her early thirties who, unlike her bestie since childhood, Heather, who’s an accomplished sommelier with the world of wine at her no purple-stained feet, has absolutely no idea what she wants to do with her life.
She’s an indifferent relationship with boy’s boy Tim, is at the end of a succession of going nowhere jobs, and who, Heather apart, seems incapable of forming lasting emotional bonds with anyone.
Not exactly what the ideal life doctor ordered, and so when Heather lets slip she’s not going to take up a job at an emerging luxury hotel in the Scottish highlands, Birdy jumps at the chance to do something different, maybe get a brand new life that actually works and means something and see what life is like when you know what it is you want to do with life.
‘And we can’t have you sullying our reputation,’ he says with a smile on his face as he slides a long dark-green bottle from the fridge. ‘ After all, I hired you.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, before forcing my broadest, most cheeky grin. ‘What on earth were you thinking?’
Even if, you do, you’re doing that vicariously through someone else’s life, vocation and sense of determined purpose.
There is much propensity for disaster in this kickstart to The Summer Job and honestly, much like Birdy herself you spend much of the start of the novel waiting for the other Shiraz-embellished shoe to drop.
That it doesn’t quite as quickly as you think it will in a story that neatly strings out the inevitable discovery of Birdy’s opportunistic fraud is testament to how well Dent sustains the tension between Birdy’s surprisingly successful, thought far from flawless new life, and the great unveiling of who she is which is surely almost upon us at a whole series of junctures.
Birdy has enough time in her new guise as a talented sommelier, which she has worked extraordinarily hard to pull off, to fall hard for chef James, a man who is kind, decent and thoughtfully ambitious and who loves a mostly very unloved Birdy, and then to realise she could lose him, and the wonderful found family she makes at the hotel which becomes the home she’s never known.
What’s clever about the idea that underpins The Summer Job is that the whole scenario could come crashing down around Birdy’s head at any point, and she knows it, and yet somehow she finds herself changed into someone new and wonderfully different even with all the deceit and tension swirling in and around her and the threat of losing everything very real and potent.
(courtesy official author site)
We’re well used in rom-coms for people to have their flawed lives wholly changed for the better; the redemptive power of love is a well-used trope in the genre and Dent uses it to very believable effect here.
But what’s different here is that the usual inevitability of things changing irrevocably for the better is not a given here, and while you suspect that because of the genre it inhabits that The Summer Job must have some sort of happy ending, it becomes increasingly clear that when the truth outs, that the fallout will be severe and brutal, and the consequences too damagingly immense for a quick two or three-page heart-to-heart to fix.
In fact, when you see how much Birdy has risked, and how big her web of lies grows, you begin to wonder if anyone, including most of all the protagonist who is funny, down-to-earth and desperately vulnerable for all her bravado, will metaphorically get out alive.
This isn’t a case of a white lie here or a harmless omission there; Birdy has bet the house on being able to carry off her entire fabricated existence, and while she is herself outside of that, you begin to wonder if she won’t end up socially ostracised to an excoriatingly completist degree, in jail … or worse.
There’s a lot riding on this, and sometimes the tension gets to you, the reader, even more than it gets to Birdy – yes, you are emotionally invested in this preposterously audacious premise and thanks to Dent’s skill, remain that way for the duration – and you just wish and pray it will all end up okay.
‘I don’t want you to go.’
It’s the most beautiful, and the most sobering sentence I’ve ever heard. I can’t look at him [James], but I [Birdy] can feel his eyes scanning my face, looking for reassurance. I feel the same. But I don’t look up; instead I stare out onto the water, watching it ripple along the bay, lapping at the black stones of the shore.
‘Me too,’ I say in the end, because it’s the truth.
But honestly how can that be the case?
As lie stacks upon lie and untruth sits cheek-by-jowl with fabrication and deceit, it seems impossible that any kind of happy-ever-after is salvageable from Birdy’s drunk-inspired gamble.
That this “messy heroine with a heart of gold” – Dent excels in these sorts of characters we’re told and she writes them beautifully, making their very flawed essence eminently likeable and highly accessible – doesn’t get subsumed under all her lies from the get-go is a miracle, and you hope that with that kind of luck on her side that maybe The Summer Job won’t end up some sort of tragic French rom-com where love is pipped at the post by death and bittersweet loss, but rather some sort of reality-defying fairytale.
This review won’t tip its hat in any particular direction but suffice to say, The Summer Job does an immersively good job, with dialogue that sparkles and characters that vividly live on and almost off the page, of keeping you guessing and in the process adding real tension and second-guessing to a genre not exactly known for playing its cards close to its chest.
By defying expectation even as it originally embraces many of the rom-com genre’s much-loved tropes and cliches, The Summer Job emerges as something rather charming and fun, and while it’s tense and you have no guarantee of a landing that won’t shatter Birdy and those around her into a million existential pieces, it’s a wholly invigorating, fun-filled and immensely enjoyable romp through lying, love and the glorious lunacy of life made up on the run.