It’s not often that a book comes along with a review built into the title, and if you think I’m going to be able to let this one pass by without making the obvious comment, you’ve got another think coming. The temptation to riff is all the stronger because the title accurately reflects the book’s contents.
First, the legend. That titular heroine’s real name is Donna Crick-Oakley, as Micklethwaite insists on repeating in the early chapters, spelling out the full name every time his focus lands on her. Which is just about every other paragraph. And adds to the strangeness of his staccato delivery. Yes. This book is full of short repetitious sentences. That could really actually just be one longer sentence. And that sometimes give the book a clever-clever air.
But generally, thanks to some nice short paragraphs and an ability to occasionally vary the rhythm, it’s a pleasant and light read.
The story unfolds easily enough. The name Donna Creosote comes from a playground taunt invented by a character called Sammy, who knew about fence paint because his dad did gardening work You aren’t going to get a better explanation than that: there isn’t one.
Donna is ginger-haired, oddly dressed and in love with novels about princesses and fairies. Her obsession with this unusual genre has gone so far that she’s lined the bedroom floor of her flat in Huddersfield with novels, and stores more in a waterproofed shelving unit in her bathroom. Who knew there were so many? Not me, and I’d have liked to find out more about them, but, alas, Micklethwaite doesn’t provide any specifics on that either.
He does at least go into great detail about Donna and her early life. The opening chapters contain a great deal more backstory than forward motion, but are just about worth it for the rounded and quirky image we get of Donna. There’s more than a touch of Manic Pixie Dream Girl about this character, but to give credit to Micklethwaite, Donna also has plenty of independent inner life away from the lead male character and dreams and goals of her own. She doesn’t quite fit into the classic definition of MPDG as coined by the critic Nathan Rabin. But that’s not to say that the book is ick-free. The author is enamoured of his protagonist and his gaze often rests for uncomfortably long periods on her body-shaving routine and various aspects of her figure.
The flipside of this infatuation is that Donna’s isolated life, and her reluctance to engage with the outside world, are presented with sympathy and indulgence. When Donna begins to forge a relationship with the same Sammy that used to bully her in her childhood, the book even becomes quite uplifting.
There are, however, more problems. Donna and Sammy indulge in an awful lot of dialogue tennis, the monotonous to-and-fro of their speech patterns highlighted all the more by a curious layout that has one character speaking in italics and both of them giving complete lines, script style, without authorial interruption or editorial. Thus:
OK, I believe you, I think.
Good, you should.
But was it only then? I mean, during college and whatnot?
How do you mean, ‘and whatnot,’ Southerner?
And so on, ad nauseam. There are a few good moments of intimacy and humour within this back and forth, but, sadly, more of tedium. Duller still are the attempts to dig into the princess story conceit, with several half-hearted, whimsy-mimsy chapters dedicated to sending Donna off on tedious flights of fairytale fancy as she reads through her novels, vaguely relates them to her life and drinks wine. None of this works, and it feels like an unnecessary and ill-thought-out diversion from what might otherwise have developed into an unusual and interestingly ambiguous love story between Donna and Sammy.
The novel’s problems are further compounded by an underdeveloped and overdecisive plot twist thrown in 25 pages before the end and making for an unsatisfying conclusion. And so it is that The Less Than Perfect Legend of Donna Creosote isn’t exactly bad – but it more than lives up to its title.
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