Louise Brooks appears on the cover of this novel, albeit without her instantly recognisable haircut, but she's the catalyst of the action, not the protagonist. After all, the title's The Chaperone, not The Problematic Teenage Star-to-Be, and that is Cora Carlisle, respectable Wichita mother and wife, corset-clad and cliché-armoured, who nevertheless bears uncomfortable secrets from Kansas to New York as she accompanies Brooks to her audition with the Denishawn dance company in the summer of 1922. Mrs Carlisle discovers her charge has no virtue to defend, and instead finds herself being changed by the encounter, a change she carries with her into a better, more open, honest and loving life.
My mum is a great fan of Catherine Cookson (or the artist formerly known as Catherine Cookson, as books were brought out under her name for some years after her death, such was the power of the brand), and The Chaperone is not all that far away from Cookson's world of doughty Geordie orphan girls who by sheer determination make good and eventually run their own sock factory. Although it is very, very far from bad, it's not going to tax you much. Ms Moriarty achieves two great things. First, she very deftly builds a narrative which isn't essentially to do with Louise Brooks around what we know about her life, and fans can smile whenever they recognise something from Barry Paris's 1989 biography (even Myra Brooks's 'fattest and richest friend' Zana Henderson appears, transformed from Brooks's acerbic account of her in the Paris book into someone Cora likes); and, second, she makes the reader happy. This is a story in which everyone is flawed and everyone is basically good, and even their flaws become the raw material of growth into kindness and understanding. You need a bit of that every now and again.
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