Maeve Binchy: Scarlet Feather

Orion, $44.95

Review: Penelope Bieder

Maeve Binchy fans will know that she turned 60 this year and that she was taken aback by all the fuss when she announced that Scarlet Feather was going to be the last of her huge (this one is 500 pages) and hugely popular romance-filled novels.

Her fans would have had to have a wee sit-down and a cup of tea as they digested the fact that there were to be no more great, fat novels to get lost in.

Binchy wants more time to "improve her bridge, have four-hour lunches with friends, go to the cinema in the afternoon, surf the internet, study Delia's videos and cook something different every week."

She also finished her column for the Irish Times after 32 years, deciding that "my readers might be fairly familiar now with my stance on everything and my view of the world."

The sad truth is, however, that we all can't get enough of Maeve Binchy, so we'll have to go back under the duvet and re-read Circle of Friends, Evening Class, Tara Road and all the other stories that kept us quiet and still for hours.

Living in London and Dublin with her writer and broadcaster husband Gordon Snell, Binchy writes about what she knows best.

Her latest follows the trials and tribulations of young Dubliners, Cathy Scarlet and business partner Tom Feather, as they work long hours to set up their catering company. It has long been their dream to make excellent food for people's parties and weddings, and their company Scarlet Feather somehow epitomises the new, less puritanical Ireland, a country more tolerant, prosperous and confident.

Ireland is also vastly more liberal and permissive. As we meet Cathy and Tom's friends and family and get to grips with just the right number of characters, we find it a changing world for sure, with no absolutes and one where the goalposts seem to move.

Binchy perfectly captures this contemporary insecurity, this fear of the new, a world where a seemingly happy relationship can slowly disintegrate.

Her enormous talent is in striking an emotional chord with her readers by knowing just how much danger to place her characters in and when to step in to rescue them.

In all her stories, and perhaps particularly this one, the ugly duckling does not necessarily become the beautiful swan but "she becomes a confident duck able to take charge of her own life and problems."

So we follow Cathy and Tom's large white catering van with the red feather painted on the side as it swings all over Dublin and beyond, stuffed with trays of delicacies, whole sides of smoked salmon, chilly bins full of oysters and frosty bottles of champagne.

This van, driven by Cathy or Tom, is a canny plot device as it goes from house to house, from story to story.

In her usual glorious conspiratorial tone, Binchy takes the reader into her confidence, sharing secrets that even her heroine has not got to yet.

The story gradually unfolds, taking its time but never losing its pace, twisting and turning and maintaining the suspense to the very last page.

There are just enough characters of all ages to dart to and fro from, but not too many to confuse. Opening neatly on New Year's Eve, it follows a calendar year in the lives of them all, with each chapter a new month. And Binchy orchestrates their lives, endowing them with an Irish charm and eccentricity that manages always to stay just this side of sentimental.

She must have kissed the blarney stone, for sure, but her wisdom really can only have come from years of close observation of people and all their foibles. Home truths are revealed in devastating fashion and in a typically understated, witty style.

She loathes the class system that still must bedevil Ireland, just as it does England. Lizzie Scarlet, Cathy's mother, cleans the houses of "the quality," her misnomer for the wealthy folks who never seem to live up to this label. And of course when we reach the happy ending after the requisite rocky road, a few of the "quality" are satisfactorily left out in the cold.

Oh, and by the way, there will be more Binchy books I hear, just not the great big treats like Scarlet Feather that we've all loved so much.