The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club, by Faith Hogan

This book promised to be 'unashamedly uplifting, feel-good and inspiring', and is quoted on the back of my copy as 'a moving and uplifting story about living life to the fullest.' And was it? Well, it definitely had a central message of living life to the full and taking every opportunity. And it did deliver on the warm fuzzy feeling. But unfortunately I do have a bit of criticism, and that is that I just felt it wasn't very well executed. I thought it had all the ingredients for a deeply heart-warming tale, but there was just something about the way it was written that irked me from page one, and unfortunately it remained like that all the way through, somewhat undermining my experience of the whole thing. Having said that, though, there were things I liked and enjoyed about this book, and I will start by talking about them.

First of all, I liked that both Jo and Elizabeth were older women. I don't think you get elderly protagonists all that often in contemporary literature (at least not in my experience) so it was lovely to see these retired women painted in such a vivacious and characterful hue. I also enjoyed Hogan's portrayal of female friendship. The three leading ladies were all without their husbands - Elizabeth and presumably Jo through death, and Lucy through divorce - and Hogan was able to spin this into a very female-empowering set-up, with each of the three discovering contentment, purpose and autonomy, with the encouragement of female solidarity. 

That's not to say the book neglected men - many of the chapters were told from the perspective of the main male characters Niall and Dan, and their storylines ran along a very similar emotional vein to the women's. Niall is Lucy's son, lonely, resentful, and looking for purpose in life, and Dan is a writer facing a career low whilst also on a life-long search for his birth mother. Both tales were, of course, satisfyingly resolved by the end.

Linked to this, we now we come to a feature that I both liked and didn't like. The story was constructed so perfectly - literally every loose end was tied, every problem solved, every rift restored; every character journeyed from an emotional low to ultimate contentment. On the one hand, this felt extremely contrived. It was just too unrealistic - life just doesn't fall into place happily ever after like that. Elizabeth's GP husband leaves the surgery empty and in debt, and Lucy just so happens to be a doctor looking for a fresh start and moving into the area - problem solved. Dan has been looking for his birth mother his whole life, and on his research trip to Ballycove finds her right in front of his eyes - perfect. Jo's dying wish is to share her insane love of naked swimming in the freezing Irish sea, and somehow every woman in the village is up for joining in - improbable, but amazing. It was such a storybook story in every possible way, that it ended up being eminently predictable. 

But although I found the plot a bit un-subtle for my liking, and in spite of correctly guessing everything that would happen (including the twist - I called it from around Chapter 7), I bizarrely found that there was something quite charming in its predictability. There was a comfort in reading something I knew wouldn't surprise me, and a sweetness to its fairytale conclusion.

The main thing that bothered me about this book really was the prose. To me, it just came across a bit clunky. The awkwardness was partly down to questionable punctuation and grammar - it quite often could have done with the addition of a few extra commas for clarity, or the removal of superfluous ones, and to be honest this punctuation problem could have largely been avoided with some mere re-phrasing: often there were just a few too many clauses jammed into one sentence and it just felt a bit muddled. The other slightly odd thing about it was the mixture between profound literary imagery ('the moon stole swiftly behind a swollen grey cloud') and light-hearted informal colloquialisms ('hadn't the foggiest', 'up to her eyes [in debt]',). Sometimes the level of formality would switch even within one sentence ('a baptism of biting cold that might chew her up in no time') and these conspicuous gear-changes were a little bit bumpy. It might have been really effective if these humorous idiomatic phrases were used to develop character, but sadly even though the chapters were alternating between five different perspectives, the narrative voice and prose style remained the same throughout.

My overall personal verdict is that I probably won't set out to read Hogan's other works. I prefer a plot that keeps me guessing, and I didn't get on with her style. However, not everyone is a nerd who gets perturbed by erroneous commas! So if you are looking for something quite light-hearted and easy-going, if the perfect story matters more to you than the prose style, then you will probably enjoy it. It was indeed an uplifting book, with a charming central message of the importance of friendship for helping you live your best life.