Jonathan and [Nicola Barker] have settled into a flat in Notting Hill, and they are just about to slip into the land of "safe marrieds." Nicola goes out for cigarettes one night and when she returns, Jonathan tells her to move out. There is not one false note in the whole book. Listen to this: "Oh God! No matter where one was, there was someone, some woman peering into one's soul. It was intolerable, he'd even caught his secretary trying to do it.

These four rule-breakers may herald a new age in women's writing. THE ESSENCE OF THE THING

The bad girls of BritLit come out

These four rule-breakers may herald a new age in women's writing. THE ESSENCE OF THE THING

Saturday, February 13, 1999

By Madeleine St. John

Fourth Estate, 224 pages, $14.95

WIDE OPEN

By Nicola Barker

Ecco Press, 290 pages, $37

ALTAR EGO

By Kathy Lette

Picador, 353 pages, $22.99

EVERY GOOD GIRL

By Judy Astley

Black Swan, 303 pages, $14.95

Popular women's fiction underwent a minor revolution in the '90s, which effectively put to rest the dominance of writers such as Jackie Collins and Barbara Taylor Bradford. Romance writing continued, of course, but the average female reader looking for escape seemed wiser, more ironic, less gullible. There was a blip with the gloomy "Aga-sagas" (named for the expensive oven English country gentry tend to buy) of Joanna Trollope, which detailed the cozy yet tormented village lives of the middle classes in Britain and which sold furiously well in the Commonwealth. But nothing particularly novel arrived on the scene until Brigid Jones ventured out and inspired a whole new kind of bodice-ripper, one with tongue firmly planted in cheek and in a lot of ruder places besides. It is a lovely change. English women have always presented such a decorous front to the world, particularly English women novelists -- so erudite, so literary, such good girls. These four novelists are defiantly not good girls.

Three of the books are frankly comedic, all four are irreverent, not particularly literary, and immensely readable. Each book thoroughly inhabits the wild success that is New Britain. In three of them, everyone has money and status, knows which wine to drink and which olive oil to buy; their only concern is squeezing as much happiness as possible out of their "relationships," which are, naturally, in turmoil. In sharp contrast, Nicola Barker's fifth book, Wide Open ,deals with the decidedly unmodernist life in today's British countryside, where no one knows their place anymore -- in fact, every single character in this book has fallen through the cracks into a netherworld where raw life, madness, disconnection, the sea, vomit and abuse dominate, and we, through Barker's troubling talent, get to feel the whole deeply sensuous catastrophe of a polluted and corrupt everyday life.

Madeleine St. John's The Essence of the Thing is by some distance the best and most accessible of these four. The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997 and deserved it for its stark, entirely truthful recounting of a break-up, the tortured emotions of the male with (guess what?) fear of intimacy and the uncomprehending agony of his put-aside partner. St. John's third novel reduces her characters to elementals and, with a stark, stripped, entirely real voice, utterly wins us over.

Jonathan and Nicola have settled into a flat in Notting Hill, and they are just about to slip into the land of "safe marrieds." Nicola goes out for cigarettes one night and when she returns, Jonathan tells her to move out. There is not one false note in the whole book. Listen to this: "Oh God! No matter where one was, there was someone, some woman peering into one's soul. It was intolerable, he'd even caught his secretary trying to do it. They peered into one's soul and left one naked and helpless."

Jonathan, the male protagonist, is convinced of the "certain and enduring hell of marriage," and just wants "his soul not only his, not only private and inviolate, but intact and securely in its proper place." He finds out that this place does exist, but it's intolerably lonely. Meanwhile, we have fallen in love with his former girlfriend, who details her agony at being shuffled off with such exactitude that one wonders if St. John has been reading our diaries. This is magnificent writing.

Altar Ego is Kathy Lette's unashamed romp through the multiple bedrooms of one of the members of the Muffia, a self-dubbed group of randy London thirtysomething career gals who shop expensively on Sloane Street and eat expensively in the West End. The book opens with Rebecca Steele shinnying down the drainpipe of her parents' council flat in Islington, clad in her $40,000 wedding gown, running away from the rich, well-bred and good human-rights lawyer who loves her. She takes up with what reads like a member of Milli Vanilli -- there are a lot of jungle-fever sex scenes in limos and Brixton, a lot of confusion, thrashing about and the inevitable "I been bad, forgive me" reconciliation at the end.

The point here seems to be that women can be just as commitment-averse, fun-loving and sexual as men. This is the only point, other than entertainment, and one needs a strong stomach to endure the unending vulgarity that Lette serves up in this, her sixth novel. That and an ability to suspend disbelief, since in real life, Lette's hilarious main character belongs in jail.

Judy Astley's fifth novel, Every Good Girl ,is an Aga-saga promoted to Central London. Nina's lawyer husband has left her for a sleek, modern, 29-year-old career girl with the body of a 16-year-old. We are then treated to Nina's mourning the loss of her youth and sexual appeal, pretty much on every one of 303 pages. The heart centre of this book is the image of a woman looking in the mirror and deciding she's not good enough. She's aging (at 41), her boyfriend/husband/partner wants someone younger and meaner, she's desperate, on the slag heap, no good for anything.

Can't we just all stop this? We all know that pictures in advertisements and the editorial pages of fashion magazines are computer-enhanced, air-brushed, lit-forever-and-a-day pieces of fiction. Can't we all just assume this as axiomatic and decide no one looks that good, not ever? I am sick unto death of my radiant 45-year-old friends telling me they are old hags, when they are far more beautiful and interesting than any bland, venal 25-year-old looking to skip a few steps in the game of life.

Nina's husband, bless him, decides the same thing and comes back to hearth and home, leaving his modernist girlfriend shopping for someone her own age, and Nina, husband and teen-aged daughters are cozily tucked up expecting a new baby. One regrets that this is probably more fantasy than it should be.

Nicola Barker's Wide Open is a visit to the other side of sanity. Three brothers, who randomly take each other's names solely -- I believe -- in order to confuse the reader, were brutalized as youngsters by their disgusting old father. Two were present -- and perhaps culpable -- for the week that their father sexually abused and then killed a young drugstore clerk. The brothers, now middle-aged, are mysteriously drawn together and two (the ones left in the house with their father) meet a different fate.

There are other characters drifting around this weird and wonderful story kernel. A feral 17-year-old kills her mother's chickens and looses a dangerous boar. A half-human, half-beast monster drifts through each character's imaginative world, and each monster is different. Mysteries abound, the writing is absorbing and gorgeous, the world the characters inhabit is ghastly, driven and mad. I have seldom been so relieved to finish a book I admired so much.

If we are lucky, these novels herald a new age in women's writing, where no one has to fit into any predetermined category or jump through a lot of hoops marked "this is literary," "this is popular" or "this is genre" to be published and read. Astley, Lette, St. John and Barker break a lot of rules in their books, as do their characters. With that rule-breaking, they have put us just a little closer to the real voices of women.

Contributing reviewer Elizabeth Nickson lives on Salt Spring Island, B.C.