When news broke that the rights to Graham Norton’s fifth novel had been snapped up, reports described it as his “most ambitious novel yet.” The simple cover art of a lone window, the pastel colours, and the blurb that describes a protagonist who has never been the main character in her own life all suggest a certain quietude. Frankie is anything but. From an indifferent upbringing in Ireland, to London’s theatre scene and eventually bohemian New York, the life of Frankie Howe is surprising, full of memorable characters, at times heartbreaking, and always vibrating with life.
Our protagonist, Francis Howe, is orphaned as a small child and sent to live with her foreboding, religious aunt and uncle. She expects her life will be spent in Ireland and lived without distinction. She doesn’t yearn for anything more. The green of her homeland comes alive on the page, but so too does the frigid religious sensibility of her small-town relatives. The fate Frankie’s family has in mind for her is ghoulish. When Frankie rebels, it’s edge-of-your-seat reading, such is the suffocating world Graham effectively depicts.
Adventure and misadventure find our heroine. She has a talent for cooking and a very good friend, Nora. These two things are the keys to her freedom.
Frankie flees her homeland for the London flat-share of the more worldly and sophisticated Nora. Now simply “Nor”, she shows Frankie a side of life Frankie never knew existed. Graham never explicitly describes Frankie as beautiful, but the way people react to her make it clear she’s very attractive, and the jealousy this sparks is often the slingshot that sends her life shooting in a new direction.
From the London theatre scene, Frankie finds herself in New York where she’s pulled into the art world where famous creative minds mingle in lofts and converted factories. Her cooking skills open doors for her, and Nor re-appears, now transformed into an extravagantly wealthy woman. Nor, and her complicated relationship with Frankie, gives the book its heart. It is in New York that Frankie comes into her own, but her triumph is bittersweet.
Frankie is rather passive character. She rarely takes action, instead she allowing her life to happen to her. However, the story is so tightly packed, that Frankie’s lack of initiative doesn’t suck the momentum out of the book as it might in the hands of a less-skilled author. Besides, Francis Howe never expected anything from her life.
If you’ve never read a Graham Norton novel, you are in for a treat. In his writing, the audience sees a different side of the gregarious chat show host. He is reflective and skilled at holding a reader’s attention by slowly unspooling the details of a story. Perfectly quirky sentences adorn his pages. A nurse wears a ribbon of lipstick the pink of a baby’s fingernail. Jewelled earrings that seemed to find every piece of light in the room.
His prose is finely honed. The story unfolds over an economical 287 pages, and not a single extraneous word has made it onto the page. Yet it feels full. Graham puts as much care into the last chapter as the first.
Frankie is a gorgeous, tender story that manages to be sweeping and grand, while also intimate at the same time. At its heart, it’s the story of two friends, the different paths their lives take and the enduring power of their connection. It’s a pleasure in every way possible.
Read the interview with Graham Norton here.
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Book Club: Frankie by Graham Norton
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