Still master of the game
THE BEST LAID PLANS Sidney Sheldon Harper Collins, $195 Now, at last, I understand why airport bookshops are filled with Sidney Sheldon novels.
After tackling The Best Laid Plans in three hours flat, unquestionably it's fluffy reading fodder, ideal for a not-too-long flight while still leaving time for a quick 40 winks.
I must confess I had forgotten reading Master of the Game, another Sheldon novel, when as a spotty, hormone-charged adolescent I pinched it from my elder sister in the belief it was hot stuff.
How wrong I was.
Sheldon tends only to offend in terms of his bland approach - of good versus evil, beauty over ugliness, right over wrong. The storyline of The Best Laid Plans is hardly original, and the prose chokes with cliches. All good, easily readable stuff.
Leslie is blonde, bold, beautiful and abandoned by her father. She is also maddeningly smug, because, you see, she knows she is far more intelligent than the rest of the human race. She has an IQ of 170, for heaven's sake.
Eventually, she finds true happiness in the creepy Oliver - a madly successful lawyer. In the novel's opening sentence, she writes breathlessly: 'Dear Diary: This morning I met the man I am going to marry.' Of course, weeks later he offers to do just that. Her reply - 'That'll do nicely' - sums up the situation as if it were, well, a transaction with an American Express card. All the while we wonder: can Leslie really be so smart? After all, she's known the man five minutes and heard of his 'ladies' man' reputation.
Shock, horror. Weeks before the fairytale wedding, she's unceremoniously ditched in favour of Oliver's previous love, whose family connections offer far more enticing prospects.
While Leslie smiles mechanically in public, underneath the resentment froths at this smack in the face. Cue Leslie's truly remarkable plan to wreak revenge. Add a power-crazed father-in-law, Oliver's ambitions for the presidency and a drug sub-plot, and the story slots into place nicely.
At times there is the odd puzzling interlude, such as being thrown into the war zone of Sarajevo with a fine young filly called Dana, whose ambition is to be a foreign correspondent and bring good to the world. Bear with it: it does have a sort of point. I wondered whether it had been added to introduce a semblance of reality.
No matter. Sheldon knows how to sustain the momentum with short, tightly-written passages cutting to the novel's other strands efficiently and regularly.
This is a novel that will not tax the reader's intelligence. It feels, at times, like American television transposed to the page: fast moving, interspersed with points of interest.
Yes, it is formulaic. And of course it will not be nominated for any prizes. But some things are more important than that - such as the ability to keep the reader turning the page. And at that, Sheldon is master of the game.
