This past week, I’ve read a light (that sounds better than ‘trashy’) trilogy of recent British historical fiction, by Penny Vincenzi, the Spoils of Time books that begin with No Angel. They read like a cross between Judith Krantz novels (lots of independent, rich women with glamourous jobs and handsome lovers and husbands) and The Thorn Birds or any number of Maeve Binchy novels (lots of affairs and friends who turn out to be untrustworthy and people marrying for money). As such, they were entertaining, and engrossing as even poorly written family sagas can turn out to be. These certainly weren’t poorly written, but they also didn’t rise either to the level of Krantz’s blithe and engaging trashiness or Binchy’s humorous and insightful characterizations.

To make another comparison with a contemporary British writer of historical fiction, Philippa Gregory, Vincenzi’s books were neither as good as Gregory’s novels of the Tudor court (that begin with The Other Boleyn Girl), nor as compellingly bad as her totally fabricated historical trilogy. They did fill the time, though, and as the story progressed I found myself wondering, especially in the second and third novels, whether the bad guys were ever going to succeed at their little games (they weren’t) and whether disaster was ever going to fail to be averted just in the nick of time (it wasn’t). In this last aspect, I found the novels peculiarly and comfortingly British, this love for the comedy (and sometimes tragedy) of timing, of near misses and fortuitous arrivals or departures that kept you, whether you liked it or not, on the edge of your seat. In only this way, the novels had a Wildean quality to them, and I was particularly reminded of An Ideal Husband, with its critical entrances and exits and the dramatic tension that’s built as a result. Besides the rather thin caricature of Wilde himself in the first novel, though, there really are no other grounds for comparison. Which is fine, as Vincenzi’s books are really not that kind of novel.

They are the kind of novel that you take to the beach, or on a train, or on a plane, and are glad to have around when you are holed up somewhere during a blizzard. They are long, they involve a whole array of feisty characters, and they manage to contain a lot of truth. It became almost a truism of the books that the women would stand up for themselves and not put up with any ‘claptrap’ from the men (that would be ‘sexism’), and it would all be for the best in the end: they would go on alone, the men would come around, or a new man made of stronger stuff would come along to fill the gap (the main characters were entirely heterosexual, with a few gay fashion photographers and the Wilde-esque professor thrown in on the edges). I enjoyed and appreciated this more feminist aspect, and I also appreciated the self-aware humor that cropped up periodically, in the form of comments made by the main characters about the kind of ‘back stairs housemaid novel’ that was very far from literature, but sold extremely well. The kind of novel that the reader could hardly object to, being totally engrossed in one at that very moment.