Dinah Jefferies: NIGHT TRAIN TO MARRAKECH

I hate to write a bad review, but this is one of the most irritating novels I’ve read in a long time. The title grabbed me – a brief visit to Marrakech decades ago left an impression that haunts me still – but the title is fake, a tease: Vicky arrives in the city by train in the opening chapter, but that’s the only rail journey in the 450-page book.

There are too many characters: Vicky, her grandmother and (later in the story) her mother and two aunts; and Bea, a girlfriend whose disappearance is one of the key story elements. Each of the women has a male support role: a boyfriend, a husband, an ex or a potential squeeze. Vicky’s mother has a guilty secret in her past which is over-trailered and a long time coming. Too many characters and not enough plot: Vicky and Bea witness a murder, but there is little mystery attached to the killing.

Dinah Jefferies thanks three editors in the Acknowledgements, but I found the book to be poorly edited. ‘A sofa covered in an ochre linen fabric with big squishy burgundy cushions’ – that ‘squishy’ is execrable. ‘He seemed to be holding on, but there had to be such a horrible mixture of emotions going on inside him’ – it can’t be just me who finds that trite and inadequate. Yves Saint Laurent makes a guest appearance (Vicky dreams of becoming an haute-couture designer), but he isn’t given anything important to say. There is a central thread to the story but the narrative meanders all over the place in order to build up the (negligible) suspense for the Reveal of the Big Secret. If the book was 150 pages shorter the pace would be crisper and the suspense more intense.

I acknowledge my impertinence in dismissing the work of the author and her three editors. This is genre fiction, a ‘Women’s Book’, but here is one male reader who thinks that female readers deserve a better-prepared dish than this. I’m pretty certain Daphne du Maurier would share my low opinion of Night Train to Marrakech. Katie Hutton, my current favourite writer of Romantic Fiction, is so much more readable and fluent. Sorry, Dinah, but as my English teacher used to write on most of my school essays: ‘Can do better. Must do better.’