‘You want to review a book for Cherwell newspaper?’
‘Sure, what’s it called?’
‘Designs for a Happy Home, by someone called Matthew Reynolds.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Upholstery.’
So it turns out it’s a novel about all aspects of interior design, not just upholstery. Fair enough. Now, I’m not an interior designer by temperament. I put away my isometric set-squares for good after I got my A in GCSE Graphic Design. I play The Sims for the godlike power it gives me over thinly-veiled caricatures of my friends and family, not for the floor-planning, garden-digging and furniture-placing fun that I usually leave to my younger sister. I’ll be handing this book on to her; she will probably get more out of it than I did.
It starts unpromisingly, with an oh-so-cutesy spiel about the importance of DESIGN, and how everyone has their own mental ‘Interior’ and how unutterably VITAL it is that your mental Interior matches your…well, your exterior Interior. It sounds like a particularly pernicious brand of self-help mumbo-jumbo, and this impression is maintained over the first half of the book. The protagonist (who calls herself ‘Alizia Tamé’, about which I can make no adequate comment) describes her various houses, her relationship with her postmodern-potter boyfriend, and her Designs. Those bits are actually pretty interesting, though some of them stretch credibility. The day I suspend my television from the ceiling, for example, is the day I expect to be sectioned.
So it’s just another self-help pseudo-novel? So it’s just, as the inside front cover says, ‘the sparkling story of a sometimes lovable, sometimes impossible, often infuriating but ultimately lovable heroine’?
Well, no, it isn’t just that. This is where ya’ll should be grateful I actually read the whole thing, instead of giving up in disgust halfway through and writing a review about gnomes. Halfway through the book, Matthey Reynolds delivers a twist so brutal, so fundamentally mean spirited that I honestly feel bad about myself for enjoying it so much. This is what redeems the book, and what almost redeems the protagonist. Far be it from me to pollute my review with spoilers; suffice it to say that the saccharine message of the first half is, if not entirely subverted, at least heavily thrown into doubt. Tamé can mutter as many Magic Mottoes and construct as many Designs for Life as she likes. In the end, the book tells us, these cannot protect her from the consequences of her decisions.
So I’m actually going to recommend Designs for a Happy Home. If nothing else, it has inspired me to redecorate my room in a mixture of Winnie the Pooh and Daoist themes (no, really – come and visit sometime if you don’t believe me).
3 stars
