Rebuilding Coventry: A Tale of Two Cities

When she accidentally kills her neighbor, Coventry Dakin, a suburban housewife, hides among the homeless in London, where Dodo, a bag lady, offers her help

Townsend's first work since the British bestseller The Adrian Mole Diaries again displays her gift for comedy, but the novel suffers from a disconcerting lack of cohesion. Coventry Dakin is an ordinary but self-proclaimed "beautiful" housewife who lives in a council estate in northern England. While attempting to break up a domestic quarrel, she accidentally kills her bullying neighbor with an action-man doll, and flees sans handbag to London. There she sells her body for two quid, briefly takes up residence with eccentric aristocrats, and finally finds refuge in a cardboard box outside Waterloo Station, where she discovers that her boxmate, Dodo, is in fact an upper-crust heiress with ties to Parliament. Meanwhile, her dull husband Derek is bereft; her son John discovers the diary in which Coventry reveals her secret fantasy life as artist Lauren McSkye (for whom her drawing teacher has a desperate and unrequited love); and curmudgeonly detective Sly is out to capture Coventry. The novel veers between the silly and sanctimonious, and while some passages are sheer fun, the majority of the book is problematic, with unconvincing shifts between first- and third-person narration, dubious plotting and indiscernible moral intentions. Many references are resolutely English, and destined to remain obscure to even the most Anglophiliac American.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

There are two things the reader should know from the outset, proclaims protagonist Coventry Dakin: one, she is beautiful, and two, she has just killed a man. The man she's murdered is a lowly neighbor whom she kills by beaning him over the head with an Action Man doll when she spots him attempting to strangle his wife in a drunken rage. She immediately flees to London, abandoning her husband and children and bringing nothing but the grungy cleaning clothes on her back. The life of homelessness and utter poverty she leads in the subsequent week is the focus of this unorthodox novel. She sleeps in doorways, grovels for food, and even prostitutes herself before settling in with the flamboyant Dodo in Cardboard City--the second of the "two cities" (the first being "normal" London). The story, written by the author of the popular Adrian Mole series for children, is fast-paced and riveting, and, although occasionally verging on the fantastic or didactic, it is worth reading, as it forces us to look closely at what we too often find is easiest to simply ignore.
- Jessica Grim, Univ. of California at Berkeley Lib.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.