Foreign Correspondents: A Romantic Comedy

Rating:
Summary: About as sparkling as stale tap-water
Review: I'm amazed by the editorial review of this book. To be quite frank, I found it boring, tedious, not remotely funny, lacking in any depth of characterisation and a chore to read. And the ending, supposedly a 'big surprise', according to the jacket blurb, was so predictable; I in fact did predict it from about the second page.

Blake's characters inspired no interest in me, although I desperately tried to feel such an interest. Clare is a wimp who doesn't know what she wants out of life, so she stays with a boyfriend who clearly bores her; she invests all her emotional energy in a correspondence with a man she's never met and who, right from his first letter, comes across as something of a psycho. This impression is confirmed when we meet Carl: he's lazy, and he's so weird he picks names at random out of international telephone directories and writes to them. This would send most people running long distances in the opposite direction, but not Clare.

Not Bernice either, Clare's surprisingly sensible friend - she actually falls for Carl! The guy has nothing to recommend him; even his creator can't seem to write him with any redeeming features. It was clear to me, long before Carl's friend Art pointed it out, that to Carl the letters he exchanged with Clare were his way of escaping from the world. He never wanted to meet her; he wanted to keep his illusions of her and believe himself in love with her - but a state of platonic love, in which he never had to take any risks or actually get to know her.

The only really likeable character in this book is Art, Carl's friend; yet Blake has a pretty good go at making us dislike him as well, given the way she introduces him at the start of the book - long tirades against the British, apparently crazy behaviour, an attitude which suggest that he treats women badly, although this turns out not to be the case.

The staged meeting between Carl and Clare was, I assume, supposed to be funny. It fell very flat with me; in fact, I found it, and the succeeding scenes, embarrassing. I found Carl's indecisiveness a complete turn-off, and Clare's quick forgiveness and change of heart as soon as she knew the truth incredible. Not an hour or so earlier she'd thought she was in love with Art; suddenly she's in bed with Carl and thinking she loves him.

Blake, while allowing one of her characters to complain about English authors writing Americans and getting the dialogue wrong, does exactly the same with her UK characters, who do *not* sound British a lot of the time. For example, no British person refers to a 'parking lot', or talks about being in 'the hospital'. Additionally, the book is very badly edited. Blake's grammatical skills are poor, and no-one has seen fit to correct her usage of punctuation, especially around dialogue. There are many mis-spellings, which jolt an already bored reader further out of the text - 'zenophobia', for instance.

I recommend other readers give this book a miss; there are many better romantic comedies on the market, some of which are actually funny.