(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Christmas is popularly thought of as a magical time of second chances.
It often doesn’t feel that with all the rush and busyness and the general furious exhaustion and angst of life seeming to reach a tinsel-draped fever pitch, but in The Nine Lives of Christmas by Florence McNicoll, it is indeed the season where loneliness gives way to companionship, naturally of the feline variety, love and connection are in the ascendancy, and Christmas does indeed live up to its reputation as a time of healing and buoyantly hopeful second chances.
The central figure in these nine tales of live reshaped and reborn is Laura, who, two yeas ago left an unsatisfying job at an advertising firm in London to work at Battersea which promises that there’s a home for every dog and cat, and who has found her life transformed by a job which, yes, gives dogs and cats a new life but which also helps the humans who adopt them new found companionship and life.
That’s the story anyway in a novel which initially feels like a big fundraising advert for Battersea, but which, once it settles into its warm and fuzzy groove, is like a big, warm and beautifully told hug you didn’t know you needed.
We all, to some extent, feel like our lives could do with some timely renovation, and in The Nine Lives of Christmas, that’s what nine different people get, and the result is not simply changed lives for people and the cats they bring into their lives but the real community, the found family, that is created.
Good god, what was wrong with her. A dose of festive madness. It was just that he’d [Aaron] been kind to her after Lettie.
She pulled hr shoulders back and said determinedly, ‘I’ll deal with the cups. Have a lovely evening and we hope to see you soon.’
Behind her, Felicia let out an enormous, happy miaow.
Central to the story and linking everyone together is Laura, who wants the very best best for every cat in her care – she is a rehomer whose job is to match the perfect cat with their new forever person – and who has a magical way of bonding with everyone who comes to Battersea or who she speaks in her day-to-day life.
Central to that life is Rob, a handsome ad exec whose dedicated, perhaps too dedicated, to his job, who likes the finer things in life, and who loves Laura; at least that’s what he says, but Laura has a niggling that Rob, who doesn’t like cats, may not be the exact right fit for her.
One man who upsets the apple cat of Laura’s assumed cosy domesticity is Aaron who wants a cat for his nan Enid who is still vital and alive at 75 but whose not as engaged with life as she once was.
It’s obvious as that cute cat that comes running to the front of the pod – each cat at Battersea has a spacious pod in which to live until they are hopefully found for their new home – that Aaron and Laura will end up together, but that’s not a bad thing because McNicoll does a great job of prosecuting the will-they, won’t-they tension so that when it comes it feels well-earned and very nicely timed.
While Laura’s story holds The Nine Lives of Christmas together and ties in the nine stories of the title, it’s the people we get to know as Laura does her thing that really give the book some unexpected emotional heft.
People like Lucie, whom Laura meets in a department store when she wants a makeover, and who, after being really rude to Laura, opens up and reveals her grandmother is dying and she feels, desperately, terribly lonely.
Or newly-divorced Mark, who is thankfully on good terms with his ex and who has his kids every second weekend, but who feels lonely and cut off from the world in an apartment where works and lives and in which he feels increasingly emotionally isolated.
He needs someone at home when the kids aren’t there, and its Laura who helps him find just the right cat for him that transforms his life in more ways than one as Mark is drawn, like the other eight characters, all of whom are given grounded and emotionally affecting stories, into the found family that slowly but surely coalesces around Laura.
Laura who, by the way, is finding her own journey transformed with The Nine Lives of Christmas every bit as much about how one person, awake to the possibilities and hopefulness of life, can find themselves renewed and reborn, not just at Christmas where all that stuff’s supposed to happen, but throughout the year which is where you really need life to be fulfilling and emotionally nurturing.
She left a cat-shaped cookie and a glass of water with a sticky note saying, ‘Drink this! Happy Christmas!’, and went to bed. As she drifted off to sleep, her mind ran over the cats that stood out more than others, where people share their stories with open hearts. There was Carlos and Skittle; Lucie and Bumpkin; Wanda and Teddy; Mark and Amber; Alison and Brandy; Jack and Pie; Casey and Notch; Rufus, Alan and Santa Paws – and Enid and Felicia. And Aaron.
Nine cats, nine shared lives. Nine Christmas Days. Nine new beginnings.
As we’re taken into the lives of titular nine, and are shown how Laura is knitting them all unintentionally together, The Nine Lives of Christmas takes on a real buoyant life of its own.
All those times you wondered what was missing from your life, when you felt achey and alone, and when it seemed like there was nothing to lift from the down place you’ve found yourself, might just need something outside your usual worldview to make a difference.
Animals like cats aren’t a magic bullet of course, and The Nine Lives of Christmas doesn’t pretend they are – McNicoll, rather thoughtfully, is honest about how tough life can be and how dealing with grief and trauma are not simply a matter of adopting a pet, like some sort of furry flicking of a switch – but it doesn’t offer the quite profound hope that if we’re open ot it, that this act of bringing a new feline friend into our lives can be the catalyst for a whole lot of other good and wonderful things.
It’s a beguilingly festive idea, and it works an absolute, soul-reviving treat in The Nine Lives of Christmas which celebrates the work of Battersea and justly so, but which goes much further, offering the very tangible and life-changing idea that adopting a cat (or for that matter, a dog) can be the very thing that not only remakes you but sets you on a course to all kinds of new connections and hope that might begin now but which will reverberate throughout the year in ways that will fill your heart and change for the better the world in which you live.