I don’t know if this qualifies as chick lit (a friend has egged me try this genre just to hear my opinion of it but I still refuse to give). Coz there was no shopping and bitching around. But the cover is oozing with pink.
The book is called If You Could See Me Now by Cecilia Ahern, the daughter of the Irish Prime Minister and girlfriend of a Westlife member, who gained international following with her first book P.S. I Love You.
The story is rather simple. The heroine Elizabeth is a buttoned-up modern woman who is obsessed with the meticulous order of things. A self-contained realist, she wants everything in her life to go right and by-the-rule. Her biggest frustration is her immediate family whose perpetual troubles are (sadly) the only spice in her life. She gravitates towards stability to compensate for the lost glory of her troubled past.
From out of nowhere came Ivan, the imaginary friend of her nephew. Yes, you read it right. Imaginary friend. Ivan is a “professional friend” who helps kids deal with their life and somehow took it upon himself to help Elizabeth as well. For after all, Elizabeth can see her (and only people who need them can see these imaginary friends).
To cut it short, heroine who has led a frigid life (and I don’t mean sexually) and imaginary friend enter into a “non-existent” relationship. In the process, troubled heroine learned to come to terms with her unhappy childhood, forgive those who brought her down and rediscovered the color that was lacking from her dreary life. Yes, like that Pleasantville movie.
The book reads like a modern fairy tale...ok, folktale (just in case Ivan does not qualify as a fairy). And Ahern’s imagery of a sleepy Irish village provides an excellent backdrop to the out-of-this-world romantic adventure.
I think a book like this is not meant to be analyzed in a cerebral way. As a marketer myself, I should know that this book was aimed to please, to send shivers down the spine and send hearts aflutter (well not this ice-cold heart of mine, just in case you want to know). It was not meant to oil the rusted gears of our mind, nor was it meant to make us shuffle our feet and re-evaluate our walk through life.
Having said that, there are two major flaws to this book. Bear in mind that this is my first time to read Ahern so this might not be her best work (legend has it that the chronology that a writer publishes her book is not necessarily the order in which they are written).
The main flaw is that the book slows down in places. Or to use one of Ivan’s vocabularies... it is at times ngirob (read that backwards). Although it was only 306-pages long, the writer could have cut it to 200-pages and still have the meat of the story. Which means the book can be squeezed into a standard Mills and Boon novel.
Second flaw is that you can’t help but notice that this is written by a very young girl who herself has not gone out into the world and saw it from not-so-rose-colored lenses. Her writing is very fluffy and overly imaginative. Granted that the premise is magical, there is an excess of childish absurdness. Everything is surreal and the “real” factor it lacked could have made the story more relevant. Although in some way I did see myself in the main characters, they were so imaginary that you did not care as much for their plight. It was like some delicious dream that you wake up to, savour for a second then forget in the next breath.
Maybe it is Ahern’s prose that needs “life” conditioning. She is exploring the mature but is enslaved by what’s juvenile.
But I must admit that the story has a heart. You can forgive Ahern’s flaws if only for her good intentions. The book’s main message is that life’s happiness does not come from precise order and the well-crafted moments. It can also come from spontaneity and the occasional exquisite chaos.
Sidebar: Disney has bought the rights to this movie and will turn it into a quasi-musical starring Hugh Jackman. It will be interesting to see how Hollywood will make fanfare out of this run-of-the-mill novel.
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