About this deal
If you've read other books in the "Rutminster" series, you'll immediately recognize all the old favourite characters.
So when I realised there was a newer book (okay, seven years after the fact I realised this), I had to get a copy. There are new love affairs, adulterous couplings, lecherous bonking and even a salacious orgy, hosted by the icky competitor trying to get damning video for blackmail purposes. How absolutely glorious to spend a few days in Rutshire with Rupert, Taggie and a host of familiar and unfamiliar people, rogues, lovers, horses and dogs. I can't help thinking that this would have been better as two books rather than this mad, too-busy rush of a story. As for Jan, it’s obvious from the off that he is the one causing problems and sabotaging everything and also trying to steal Taggie.Have read a few interviews with her recently - the Camilla Long one in the times was particularly interesting. There is also a cast of animals that runs to six pages, including “BLOOD RIVER: A South African First Season Sire in love with the vet”. The Blacks’ is a frequently used phrase and then softened by highlighting the fact that Rupert and Taggie adopted black children. And are we now meant to assume that Gala and Gav stay living 100 m away from Taggie and Rupert and it is all fine. Her writing as always was witty and the descriptions so beautiful and visual with the Gloucestershire countryside, the flowers, the constellations, all so picturesque and skillfully drawn.
In previous books when he cheated on his first wife Helen I was routing for him because she was a truly awful woman. It's also not very fairytale-ending unlike some of the others, though of course it ends reasonably happily for all the progatonists. I'm scanning my way through the endless chapters on the intricacies of a local horse race in the hope of finding a few words on humans, preferably one I know, or a crumb or two of humour or raunch. They are the sort of books that you want to get to the end of to find out what happens but you don't because you don't want to leave that world and its inhabitants behind. Rupert is consumed by one obsession: that his adored stallion Love Rat be proclaimed 'Leading Sire'.
Mount" is not the sparkling, witty and ironic poke at Britain's class system, unlike her previous novels. Luckily, the fort at home is held by Rupert’s assistant Gav, a genius with horses, fancied by every stable lass, but damaged by alcoholism and a vile wife. This might have been something JC could get away with in the early 90s but not now, it’s not a funny ‘look what you used to be able to get away with saying’ when it’s published in 2016.
It's still a good book and nice to revisit old friends even if it's briefly but hope they don't deteriorate further.Jilly could have written about the ups and downs of a long marriage but she really didn't need there to be butterc**t. I have read every book in this series and, I'm sad to say I won't be in a rush to read any more, should Cooper choose to continue. She should have written a book on rural England if you ask me - it would be a classic, instantly, and give her talent what it deserves ie a place in the canon.