A book I read

‘Riders’ by Jilly Cooper

This March’s Book Group read. Claire, a JC fan, had flirted with putting Cooper’s 2023 novel Tackle! on our reading list, but then thought better of it, I think because she thought the rest of us wouldn’t like it. However, I quite fancied reading a JC as although I read a number of blockbusters in my teens, notably Lace and several of Jackie Collins’ novels, I had never read any Cooper. Most likely I was put off by the horsey theme suggested by Riders’ famous “bum in jodhpurs” cover art. However, I picked it for our book list as being a Cooper novel I knew of, and it’s also the first in the "Rutshire Chronicles” series of which Tackle! is the eleventh and latest (the term "Rutshire" is not mentioned in Riders so must have been something Cooper thought up for subsequent novels).

Characters

The main characters:

• Rupert Campbell-Black, successful show-jumper, Adonis and vile posho. Lives at Penscombe, a country house and estate in Gloucestershire;
• Jake Lovell, half-Romany ex-children’s home boy. When we meet him, he is working at a riding school, being great with the horses and rude to the children and their mothers. Jake’s gypsy father walked out on the family when Jake was eight. Jake first met Rupert Campbell-Black at prep school, which Jake was attending thanks to his mother being the school cook;
• Helen Campbell-Black, née Macaulay, at the start of the novel a 20-something American who’s just come over to the UK and is working for a London publisher. For most of the novel, Rupert Campbell-Black’s wife, after she idiotically marries him despite knowing perfectly well by a few dates in that they have nothing in common;
• Billy Lloyd-Foxe, Rupert’s schoolfriend and live-in chum. Nice but weak;
• Victoria “Tory” Lovell, née Maxwell, at the start of the book a pudgy 18-year-old reluctantly being dragged around the deb circuit by her mother, and later Jake’s loyal and long-suffering wife;
• Fenella “Fen” Maxwell, Tory’s younger sister and, by the end of the novel, champion showjumper at only 19. Behaves in a bit of a bratty way, but then she is still only a teenager by the end of the novel;
• Colonel Malise Gordon, distinguished Chef d’Equipe of the UK equestrian team

Blurb re story

I’m not going to attempt a synopsis of the story as it’s an endless rollercoaster of events, with Jake on top one minute, Rupert the next. It’s structured around a series of horse trials/events/whatever it is they’re called. The horsey stuff was actually reasonably engaging and I did find myself getting quite into the various horses and their personalities.

Much of the stuff in the novel that would nowadays be considered on the problematic side, I was able to reasonably gloss over as being to be expected from a novel of this age and type. It’s all loaded with sexist and boorish behaviour, infidelity and general reckless irresponsibility: the latter including shedloads of drink driving, and several times I found myself chiding characters for drinking so much on empty stomachs (e.g. reading page 141, I found myself shouting at Helen HAVE A SANDWICH). But I think getting too aerated about all that is a bit pointless. What was more difficult to gloss over is Rupert’s cruelty – to his horses, his son, his wife and tbh most of the people he comes across: not content with having bullied Jake in school, he won’t let up when he encounters him again in adult life, calling him “Hopalong”, “Gyppo” and mocking his mother’s suicide.

I was pleased that Jake has slightly rescued his life by the end of the book, though that only happens in the last few pages. I was aghast at his idiocy in starting an affair with Helen Campbell-Black – however pathetic Helen appeared, he should have steered well clear for his own sake. Jake’s genius with horses, plus his excessive nerves before competitions, presumably suggest that he’s better suited to being a trainer than competing as a rider. And I was pleased that he does, against the odds, secure the sponsorship that Rupert wanted, so one over on Rupert. Unfortunately, though, it’s left open whether Rupert’s spite and (completely unjustified) desire for vengeance might mean he continues to try and thwart Jake at every opportunity. We’ll never know.

Rupert Campbell-Black

Skimming back covers and snips of reviews of Cooper’s books over the years, I had got the impression that Rupert Campbell-Black was a recurring character and some sort of hero, albeit a roguish one. Ruth has read another one of Cooper’s "Rutshire" novels – Appassionata, I think – and confirms that RCB is in it, albeit in a more minor role. Reading Riders, I was shocked at how horrible Rupert is. Heroes in romance and other popular novels are definitely of a type: handsome, taciturn, occasionally domineering – but RCB goes beyond that into sheer unpleasantness. He thrashes his horses, punts his toddler son across the room, beats Helen up when she confesses to an affair and constantly baits and demeans others, including his wife (“You must be the only person who’s excited my dear wife in years. I certainly don’t.”). (Rupert, of course, has been sleeping around for years, which he blames on Helen’s frigidity; when Helen is faced with photographs of Rupert cavorting with his groom in one of their fields, he turns it on her, with “Why should I apologize for your inadequacies?”)

In general, cruelty to animals and hitting women and children would completely debar a man from hero status. But I got the strong impression that despite Rupert’s flaws, Cooper was representing him as a hero. There were several points where I suspected Cooper was depicting a character she herself fancied: at one point a horse is “driven on [around the course] by Rupert’s erotic pelvic thrusts”. Wearing a new designer suit, "such was Rupert's masculinity, and the enhanced blueness of his eyes, and the lean, broad-shouldered length of his body" - Christ, calm down, woman. When he attempts sex with his wife when she is upset after their baby's hospitalisation, he was, apparently, trying to comfort her "in the only way he knew". Diddums. The distinctly non-consensual group sex scene that Rupert ropes Helen into with Billy and Billy's wife Janey (Rupert locks Helen in with them and orders her not to be “a fucking spoilsport”) is distasteful beyond the general macho behaviour that permeates the book.

Towards the end of the novel, Rupert jumps a clear round at the Los Angeles Olympics despite having one arm in a sling and is feted even by the usually-disapproving Malise Gordon, who makes a sick-making speech telling Rupert that “without doubt you produced the finest and bravest display of riding I’ve ever seen”. Rupert isn’t brave, he’s an utter pig and sufficiently unpleasant to put me off reading any of Cooper’s subsequent novels, which I might have done otherwise.¹

Riders was published in 1985. The story begins in 1970 and works its way up to the mid-eighties.

 

¹  I've never been attracted to complete bastards, however ropey their arsing childhoods might have been - see Christian in Fifty Shades of Grey, and back in the eighties I remember having a dispute with my sister as to the merits of Judd Nelson’s character in The Breakfast Club. I maintained that he had zero merits; Hannah felt I think that he had some sort of tortured soul quality caused by childhood neglect that excused him. Yeah, sod that.

Some books read in 2025

‘When I Fell From The Sky’ by Juliane Koepcke

I remember reading a version of Juliane Koepcke’s story as a child and it was one of those stories that stuck with me (though Koepcke observes at several points in this 2011 memoir that many of the accounts written in the 1970s about her experience took a lot of liberties with the truth).

On Christmas Eve 1971, Juliane, then 17, was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed her mother and left her stranded in a remote part of the Peruvian rainforest, where she spent 11 days before being picked up by forest workers and taken to safety. (Her survival of the crash seems incredible, though evidently some people have contrived to survive plane crashes.) Koepcke notes that the forest canopy probably served to break her fall, and there is a suggestion that because she remained strapped into her seat, part of a bank of three that had originally contained her mother and another passenger, this had a slowing effect similar to a parachute; she also observes that she landed underneath the seat, which may have given her some protection from the elements until she recovered consciousness. Her subsequent survival in the jungle is attributable partly to her familiarity with it but also to her own determination, given that she was injured, presumably suffering from some degree of shock and must have realized that her mother was probably dead. “I think of my mother during each of my nights, in which I barely sleep.” “I have to keep going. Keep going. Here I will perish.” At one point she comes across three corpses, still in their seats but driven head-first into the ground with only the lower portions of their bodies visible; Juliane is only able to tell that the female corpse is not her mother because she knew her mother never painted her toenails.

Her recall of how she managed in the days after the crash, and the strategy she adopted, make for fascinating reading. On regaining consciousness, Juliane was unable to locate any of her fellow passengers and although she could hear search planes overhead, realized that the tree cover was too dense for them to ever see her in the area she was in, so decided to move off. She remembered advice her father gave her: “If you get lost in the jungle and you find flowing water, then stay near it, follow its course. It will bring you to other people.” She locates a tiny rivulet nearby, which becomes a stream, and eventually a river, the Río Shebonya. Finding it difficult to proceed on foot – she had lost a shoe in the crash, and was worried about stepping on a stingray – she resorted to swimming in the river. The water contained caimans – a type of alligator – but she knew that these creatures did not generally attack people. Koepcke acknowledges her debt to her parents in teaching her what creatures to look out for and avoid and which could be ignored. Before reaching the river, she had heard and recognised the calls of hoatzins, which she knew nest exclusively near open stretches of water, which had reassured her that she was on the right track.

After the crash, Juliane spent four weeks recovering in a mission station in Yarinacocha, home of the missionaries of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. Her father, perhaps understandably, appears to have been distracted, going daily to the temporary morgue that had been set up, waiting for his wife’s body, but I did think that his daughter ought to have been better protected and shielded from journalists and visitors: in addition to their hanging around the mission station, she seems to have been relentlessly mobbed by them after returning to Lima. She must have felt like public property, at a time when she needed to get back to as much normality as was possible. On a lighter note, Koepcke relates the vast numbers of letters she received, including, inevitably, some from weirdos, including a bizarre letter urging Juliane to learn Esperanto and to write a book in that language about her experience.

Koepcke is German but was born and brought up in Peru, and lived there her whole life until her father sent her “back” (she’d never lived there) to Germany after the crash to complete her schooling. For the three years prior to the crash, Juliane had been living with her zoologist parents at ‘Panguana’, the biological research station they had established in order to analyse the ecosystem of a small area of the Peruvian rainforest. She relates incredible journeys with her parents from Lima over the Andes and into the rainforest to the research station, the whole thing about a week’s journey. Koepcke’s affection for the rainforest permeates the book: “It is no green hell. It is a part of me.” Koepcke followed in her parents’ footsteps and became a zoologist, doing her doctoral thesis on rainforest bats.

Koepcke frames her memoir from the viewpoint of a present day trip to Peru with her husband to wrestle with the Peruvian authorities to have Panguana declared a nature reserve and in doing so hopefully saving it from encroaching civilization and deforestation. The book’s cover shows a still from Werner Herzog’s 1998 documentary Wings of Hope, which featured Koepcke returning to the crash site in the company of Herzog and the film crew (it's available to watch on YouTube here).

On a side note: the safety record of LANSA, the Peruvian domestic airline that the Koepckes were flying with on the fateful flight, would read as comical if so many deaths hadn’t been involved. At the time of the 1971 crash, LANSA had already lost two planes in crashes, with a total of around 150 fatalities. The airline was notorious in Peru and Juliane recalls a Spanish saying that roughly translated as “LANSA lands on its belly”. Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke had urged his wife not to fly with LANSA but all other flights for that day were booked up. The plane itself was a type that had been taken out of service in the US some years earlier, and of a design that had trouble withstanding turbulence; to top all that off, it had been assembled from spare parts of other aircraft. It was LANSA’s last airworthy plane and the airline’s operating licence was revoked shortly after the 1971 crash. Shame it took that long.

When I Fell From The Sky was published in 2011, and in English in 2012, translated by Ross Benjamin.

‘The Corset’ by Laura Purcell

It’s Victorian times. Dorothea Truelove is 25, wealthy and does charitable work that includes visiting women prisoners at New Oakgate Prison, the Oakgate Charitable Women’s Society having deemed it “beneficial for lady visitors to call upon the inmates and improve them with edifying conversation”. Ruth Butterham is 16 and has just been banged up in said prison for – allegedly – poisoning her mistress with arsenic. The novel alternates between Ruth’s telling of her own story to Dorothea, and Dorothea’s perspective on things.

Ruth’s story is relentlessly grim from start to finish. After her father, a struggling artist, commits suicide, her mother, a seamstress, is left impoverished and is reduced to having Ruth, a talented needlewoman, apprenticed to a dressmaker in order to pay off her debts. Unfortunately, the dressmaker is the vile Mrs Metyard, who has four other girls, all foundlings, already apprenticed to her and living a wretched existence. Mrs M enjoys occasionally dressing up as her late husband and administering brutal thrashings. Early on, Ruth had become convinced that she can cause damage to people with her needle and by the time Dorothea meets her in prison, is convinced that she has caused the deaths of more than one person. It started after she embroidered a silver angel on a blanket for her baby sister and, when her sister died from the “strangling angel” (diphtheria), was convinced that she had caused the baby’s death. While at Metyards, she sews a corset for the bridal trousseau of Rosalind Oldacre, a former schoolmate who had tormented Ruth, and Rosalind subsequently dies – actually from arsenic poisoning from green dye in her clothes, but the death further confirms to Ruth her own terrible powers.

Dorothea’s mother is dead and she has a tense relationship with her father, who wants her well married. Dorothea is an enthusiastic amateur phrenologist and keeps a human skull in a drawer in her desk, hidden from her father, who disapproves of her interest in phrenology. Dorothea seems to be of the view that phrenology has the power to detect evil propensities through head mapping and that the shape of the skull may actually change if certain organs of the mind are developed; she measures Ruth’s head regularly while Ruth is in prison, and is forced to conclude that Ruth is irredeemeable because she has observed no change in the shape of her head, though she also observes that Ruth’s “moral organs” are more developed than she expected, and is confused by this.

Late in the novel, the theme of poisoning spills over into Dorothea’s life, when a concerned family friend informs her that Dorothea’s father poisoned her mother, and that he believes Dorothea to be in danger from the same fate. At Dorothea’s last visit to the condemned Ruth, Ruth embroiders an ‘R’ onto Dorothea’s handkerchief and bids her deliver it to her late mistress’s husband. I have to say I was a bit confused by the ending: has Ruth somehow killed Dorothea’s father? How has the handkerchief ended up back at the Trueloves’ home? Maybe I missed something here.

The Corset was published in 2018 and was Purcell's fourth novel.

‘Trust Me, I'm a Junior Doctor’ by Max Pemberton

“Medical school has been rather like a long holiday, punctuated by the odd sick person.”

Engaging memoir based on Max Pemberton’s Telegraph columns, recounting his first year of working as a doctor in the NHS. It kicks off as he and his medical school peers start their first jobs as junior doctors, aka “house officers”.

By Pemberton's account, new house officers are dropped in at the deep end, immediately expected by nurses to know how to do everything without being shown and kicked around by the more senior doctors. It does sound a complete baptism of fire. The junior doctors feel tyrannized by their pagers; addressing his, Max says: “Bleep, I know you’re going to, and you know I won’t know what to do.” He relates being alone on night shift, sprinting from one ward to another, having to put in endless cannulas.

Pemberton’s first, six month, stint as a junior doctor was on a surgical ward, after which he decided surgery was not for him. Apparently the system is: six months on general surgery, six on general medicine. The eventual completion of his 12-month stint meant registration with the General Medical Council, and becoming “a slightly more senior junior doctor”.

He has a bit of a rant about various things. He has a dig at hospital managers and targets. Good nurses leaving because they are overwhelmed by excessive demands and excessive paperwork. He relates how, during his first year, he had doubts, despite all his training, about whether medicine was for him. Towards the end of the book, he bemoans how medical school did not prepare him for life on the wards: although he knew the details of how paracetamol worked on the body, he had not been taught how to prescribe it. He also relates plenty of amusing incidents, including how the man turning up at A&E with a hairbrush inserted into his rectum provided enough amusement to make six years at medical school seem worth it.

“Max Pemberton” (it’s a pseudonym) is an NHS psychiatrist who also writes a column for the Daily Mail.