Maggie Alderson: Pants On Fire

Penguin

$24.95

Review: Diane Brown

If you wouldn't be seen dead reading a Mills and Boon at the beach but secretly hanker after a light romance, this could be the book for you.

The cover sketch portrays a woman wearing hot-pink tight Capri pants. It promises sex and delivers a little - but nothing to shock your grandmother, apart from one reference to the equipment of Pants on Fire himself, a seducer who has one-night stands with every attractive woman on the staff of Glow, a glossy Cleo-type magazine.

Alderson, born in Britain, has worked on glossy magazines and writes about a world with which she is familiar.

Her narrator, Georgia Abbott, flees London for Sydney when she discovers her fiance has a penchant for gymslips and prostitutes.

Soon she's working for Glow as deputy editor and is immersed in a very social life. Hardly any work seems to get done at Glow, but that doesn't matter because the staff source most of the stories from their tangled love lives.

Everybody is beautiful and rich, except for features writer Linda Vidovic. She steals lines from Georgia's life because she doesn't go to parties herself.

She was once a druggie and is into astrology and numerology, prompting her to change the spelling of her name to a more favourable number.

The beautiful and rich beauty editor, Debbie, whose fiance has died, has a cocaine habit; Zoe, the beauty editor, is bulimic.

The men who circle the women are mostly rich and horsey, or are camp and sport women's names. There are elaborate parties with lots of booze and drugs, leavened by the occasional romantic night at the beach or in the bush.

It seems Georgia stepped off the plane wearing rose-coloured spectacles. The sun shines every day and there don't seem to be any traffic-jams.

It's told in the first person, but I couldn't detect a trace of irony. The style is chatty with realistic, but not particularly witty, dialogue.

Alderson could be cashing-in on Bridget Jones' Diary, but Pants on Fire is not nearly so funny. But at least it lacks pretension.

* Diane Brown is an Auckland poet and novelist.