A beautifully written story about the joy and sadness of a dying father’s relationship with his daughter
Iris, the 16-year-old kleptomaniac narrator in Jenny Valentine’s fifth novel, is overcome with excitement whenever she sees an unstruck match, a “humble thing on the edge of greatness”. I feel the same when I read the opening lines of a new book by Valentine. When, in the very first paragraph of Fire Colour One, Iris lights the “great big fire” at her father’s funeral, causing her family to “gulp for air like landed fish”, I was mesmerised at once. All I had to do was sit back and enjoy the show.
Iris’s father, wealthy art dealer Ernest Jones, is dying of cancer. The timing is unfortunate: he has only just been reacquainted with his daughter after a long separation instigated by Iris’s mother, Hannah, a woman dressed in “credit-card finery” who hides her lack of tears at Ernest’s predicament behind a pair of large black sunglasses (“High-impact accessories are my mother’s answer to big occasions, in place of actual feelings”). Her marriage to Ernest broke down 12 years previously, and Hannah took Iris, running away with “one-time TV star” Lowell Baxter to Los Angeles.
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