Deborah Moggach: Final Demand

By JENNY JONES*

Someone somewhere helps themselves to the till and across the world someone dies. Is the death a direct result or is it the result of a chain of events, without any one of which death would not have taken place? If so, which event is really to blame?

These are some of the questions Deborah Moggach, British author of 13 novels, explores in Final Demand.

Thirty-two-year-old Natalie, beautiful, but bored in her work for telecommunications giant NT, needs money and excitement. People have always let her down - first her parents, now the men in her life. She knows she must be the one to make the changes.

Unfortunately for society, Natalie has a largely inactive conscience and an instinct for rationalisation. Once possessed of a scheme there is no stopping her.

If only her initials were the same as those of the company whose job bores her to death, she could turn her life around. Women change their initials, don't they, when they marry? Colin Taylor would be only too happy to oblige.

Having laid the foundation for a racy tale, Moggach fills out her story with believable characters who have personal histories and hopes for their futures.

Sometimes she fuses setting with character perfectly. Take David the publican.

"An argument had to be put on hold for hours until, having ejected the last drunk, David could continue it at the point where it had been interrupted. Over the years he had become accustomed to this; it was the rhythm of his working life, and sometimes, by chucking-out time, the quarrel had lost steam. Sometimes, however, it had gathered its own momentum and grown out of all proportion. It entirely depended on mood."

The characters are often breathtakingly ordinary - something rare enough in fiction to make them interesting - but not tragic. Although believable, the characters don't drive the plot. It is not their own fatal human flaws that underpin disaster or rather, it is, but you don't get a sense of that.

The novel is basically about an idea and a plot. It's enjoyable but it feels contrived.

In her last novel, the bestselling Tulip Fever, Moggach explored the human phenomenon of lying and its tendency to obsess the liar and isolate him or her from other people.

In Final Demand, too, she explores this theme, but now the guilt-ridden 17th-century heroine has been replaced by 20th-century Natalie, who experiences genuine affection for her car more readily than for human beings and is almost entirely morality-free.

Moggach, on the other hand, clearly cares very much about how a human being should tackle the problem of meeting individual needs when immersed in a structure that is inimical to them.

Heinemann

$44.95

* Jenny Jones is an Auckland writer.