Are you sure you want to answer it? (Ringing For You - Anouchka Grose Forrester)

Member Name: MorganaDQ

Product:	Ringing For You - Anouchka Grose Forrester
Date:	13/03/01 (78 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Hilarious in places

Disadvantages: It goes off on too many unnecassary tangents, story a little too drawn-out

"Ringing For You" is a comic tale of the every day life of a receptionist. Actually, as she likes to continually point out, she's not a receptionist. She's simply someone who's temporarily working the job of a receptionist. Apparently there's a difference.

She decides to take this job after realising that her Masters in the History of Punishment: from Ancient Greece to the Victorian Era, was going to do her no good whatsoever. We join her after she's joined a temping agency and already working as a receptionist.

On first appearances it really does seem to be a person sat at her desk at work, noting down her observations and feelings. The main point of the novel is to sort out her feelings towards 'The Man Who Mustn't be Mentioned' (MWMM), and ultimately to see if there's going to be a happy ending or not.

It does sound dull, I know. I was in two minds whether or not to bring it home from the library, then realised I was gonna lose nothing by doing it, so home it came. The problem I have though, is I can't decide whether or not I made the right choice.

The front cover of the book has a quote from Vogue "Wildly funny". Well yes, it is, at least for the first half anyway. To be perfectly honest, for the first ten chapters I was literally laughing so hard that at times I was nearly in tears.

It's the honesty of the words which spring from the page and grab a hold of you. Okay, not literally but you know what I mean. Just when you think she's getting really serious, she hits you with one line. All it takes is one line to make you break into fits of giggles until hubby decides it's time to bring in the men with the white coats. It's just a shame it seems to trail off and leave a feeling of such immense disappointment. I'm sorry but it does.

The ramblings at first are excellent. It's like a friend talking to you over
coffee, spilling her heart out and trying to make sense of her life. Although we never find out the name of our 'friend'. The best narrative we have is in chapter five. Here we learn all about the heroine's work colleagues. The descriptions everyone can relate to, everyone knows someone like this...

The office manager is an "Enid Blyton-style headmistress". You know the type, wild taste in clothes (checks, flower patterns, etc, all worn at once), eccentric, but still disapproving of everyone else's eccentricities. The printers are the only people who can relieve her of her duties in order to visit the bathroom, and consequently take great pride in making her wait as long as possible. The Doctors seemingly consider her to be of such lower intelligence than themselves that she's not worth really talking to. For each person there's a theory as to their characteristics, and the descriptions are nothing if not inspirational. Think of how you wish you could describe a work colleague if you had the guts to do it, then read it on the page.

Though by far my favourite character is the ex-receptionist. His antics in the office had me in stitches. He simply has to work out his notice then he's gone. Of course, he's one of those people who doesn't care what he does anymore, he's already leaving after all... what can they do? Sack him? He does things you and I would only ever dream of, and probably have from time to time. I can't help thinking that this character would have been a better base for the novel.

These rambling are, for the first half of the book, excellent (as I said earlier), but it gets to the stage whilst reading where all you want is for the rest to be condensed into one solitary page so the book can be put away, returned to the library, so you can go on with moaning about your own life instead of reading the nameless character moaning about hers.

There are
a lot of truths contained throughout about life in general, though mainly about why we insist on doing certain (usually stupid) things while we're infatuated with someone. Just when you get settled and understand what she's talking about, for some reason she decides to go off on a tangent and simply confuse or bore us. Too many times whilst I was reading I wished she'd just get to the point.

What I can't decide is whether this book is trying to be a self-help book, a comedy of errors, or simply a romance. Maybe the reason I can't decide is because neither could the author.

It's not a complete waste of time, really it isn't. There's not many books that can make me laugh so hysterically that I need a bathroom break. But there's also not many books I've read that can make me want to put it away and forget about it halfway through.

Ultimately, we do find out what happens with the MWMM, but I really feel it could have been done maybe fifty or sixty pages sooner than it did. We find out a great deal about the heroine, but maybe a little too much (I felt a little swamped after a while with her feelings constantly bombarding me). We find out a little about some of the colleagues, but maybe not quite enough.

The only character we get any depth about is one of the Doctors (Philip Scroll), and it's revealed in the last chapter (though even this is minimal). Unfortunately, although it seems to have been written for the surprise factor, it didn't work in my case. Very quickly I figured out what lay beneath the veneer of this character, and the final chapter just seemed to act as confirmation.

All in all it's an interesting book which will make you laugh at first, but ultimately is likely to make you feel somewhat deflated and irritated. I'm going to recommend it simply because I'd recommend it more than I wouldn't. Does that make sense? Maybe I should go
before I start on the same ramblings as Forrester.

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Published by Flamingo
ISBN 0-00-655156-4

At the time of writing Amazon.co.uk have this title on offer for £5.59

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