The Curing of a Bibliomaniac Part 20: Noah’s Ark (Barbara Trapido, 1984)

Books left: 6. Weeks left: 10 (home stretch!)

It may well be that somewhere there is a book lover who only cares about the actual content of the books and not about how they look.  

I am not that one.

Part of why I turned into this raging pathological bibliomaniac in the first place is because I love the whole package of a book. I love how the judicious choice of jacket quotes on a really attractive and striking and original and appropriate cover design can combine to scream at the susceptible bibliophile PICK ME UP AND RAVISH, I MEAN READ, ME. GO ON, DO ME UNTIL I’M IN TATTERS.

I love how the collaboration between a literary and a visual art can collide in a way that communicates something entirely new and individual about the contents of the book. And when they get shabby and crinkly and old, I love that too. I love yellowed pages and cardboard covers weathered with a series of fine lines, just like an ageing face, and ones bearing illustrations so reminiscent of their era in their designs and their fonts that they are attractive just like a fifties pin-up. Such books age beautifully, like Jessica Lang, or a nice bottle of red.

A good book with a bad cover is like an important news story without a photograph or with a boring headline. It’s a shame and a waste because ain’t nobody going to read it.

’ve loved Barbara Trapido since I was a whippersnapper but the only reason I knew to collect her titles is because I happened to read The Travelling Hornplayer when I was aforementioned whippersnapper and the Matriarch and I both read all the same books. This stage of my life followed the stage in which all my books were about ponies and improbably fun English boarding schools.

So it’s lucky I stumbled across Trapido then through the Matriarch, because I certainly wouldn’t pick up one of these books today based on their covers. Just look at those covers. They look as though the publisher’s ten-year-old offspring thought it was a great idea and no one else in the meeting dared to disagree. The colours are ugly and clashing, the drawings unappealing, the font horrendous. The designs are eyesores, to my mind. 

Some more of my Trapido titles, still with rather bad covers.  

Now I’ve eaten up half my word count with a rant I’ll make the review short and sweet.

This is essentially the story of the unlikely marriage of an odd couple – but an oddly perfect one.

But Trapido is a surprising author. One moment you think of her as like a nanny who talks a lot about gender roles and the next she reveals herself as a titillating storyteller who conjures up a superlatively immediate romance, complete with the c-word and plenty of orgasms.

Her dialogue and general prose is constantly gigglesome. You are always smiling to yourself, but it’s too hard to pick a bit to read aloud to someone to share the pleasure because you need the effect of reading the sentence before that bit and the sentence after that bit and before you know it you have read out loud a whole four pages and StuMo has fallen asleep.

Any Trapido is a great suggestion for book club: short enough that those members who balk at a book over 200 pages will not be frightened, and so easy and fun everyone will finish it for once and you can discuss the ending without anyone saying they don’t want any spoilers because they only have a “few chapters to go”. It is intelligent and literary enough to feel like you are reading literary fiction worthy of a book club and with a few discussion points, but it is close enough to general fiction that there will be no disagreements about what something Meant, and the discussion will soon end in you all quaffing more wine and gargling more cheese (as Bridget Jones would say) and saying how great the choice was and then turning to mindless gossip.

You’d have to be made of stone not to enjoy this. It’s effortless, sexy and relentlessly funny. I dragged out the last few pages, not wanting it to end, and felt all disgruntled for at least two days that I couldn’t read it any more but had to pick something else.

Keep or kill? This one is a win for the Project. I have now read all of the titles of Trapido’s I own and have pictured (except Juggling, the one with the dreadful watercolour, or whatever it is, of clowns, or whatever they are.) So I’ll keep that one to read and get rid of the rest, because let’s face it, these are not collectable editions. It’s hardly a set of matching Ian Rankins, for instance. Hurrah! Another pile bites the dust.