The world gets an enjoyable replacement to singleton Bridget Jones, hooray — in another form, another age and with a completely different voice. While Helen Fielding’s Bridget is adorable and ditzy, Deborah Moggach’s Prudence is a Guardian-reading former school teacher and is anything but ditzy. Something she plans to change asap.
Prudence throws prudence to the wind after her husband leaves her. We meet her when she’s 69 going on 70, and she makes it clear that she doesn’t want to die alone with bluebottles buzzing around her. “Why had he left me, just when we were free to go anywhere and do whatever we wanted? We had so many plans. It was so companionable, getting old together.”
After a few months of mourning, Pru realises that while she doesn’t necessarily miss her husband, she misses companionship. Someone around the house to talk to, someone you can hear pottering around in the next room, someone who can fix the boiler—things like that.
Her children are busy with their lives in different countries, her old friends are “smug marrieds” and being with them only makes her feel envious that they have each other. The only person she can be comfortable with is her best friend Azra, a wild flower child, who has always been single. “I was phoning her far more often than was healthy. Desperation is all very well in the young but, like a short skirt, it’s not a good look for a seventy-year-old.”
Azra does her best to encourage Pru to get her act together and enjoy her independence. Giggly plans about how to catch men her age are tossed about. But then the friendship between Azra and Pru comes to an abrupt end, and now Pru is completely alone, and bluebottles are definitely going to buzz around her dead body! “Do you know what I mourned, even more than my marriage? I mourned the loss of Azra, the way we’d laughed and bitched together. Most of all, the vision of independence she’d given me.”
On an impulse, Pru buys a little black dress from a charity shop, a dress that “spoke of cigarettes and Martinis”. Then she kick starts her plans to pull men. Not at cocktail parties, oh no, but at funerals! Sheer madness follows, and the humour is beautifully dark.
Several escapades later, the humour becomes many shades darker, almost as black as the dress. And, the Covid pandemic arrives with its claustrophobic lockdowns. Startling revelations are made, Pru learns that there are different versions of everyone (including herself), and embarks on a new phase of life.
While the book is certainly an enjoyable read, it’s not gripping at all times. The pace keeps changing — from long spells of sadness to sudden spurts of madness and activity. Some of the situations are contrived and almost ridiculous, but you stay with it and go with the erratic flow because you really want to know what happens to Pru. While the book may not be a ‘must read’, it’s definitely a ‘should read’.
The Black Dress
Deborah Moggach
Hachette India
pp. 278; Rs.599
