By her own admission, the task took her just a couple of days to complete. "We're in this white limo purring through crowded Saturday-night streets Like in Hollywood," the novel began. And it was enough to send Sue Fletcher at the publishers Hodder & Stoughton into a state of ecstatic optimism. She dispatched a white stretch limo to pick up Jenkins and carry her to Hodder's offices on London's Euston Road. On arrival, the author-to-be was greeted by a themed wedding presentation, deemed suitable for a book that was to be titled HoneyMoon.The wooing worked. Maybe because of the limo, but more likely because Hodder offered a mammoth £600,000 advance, and Columbia Pictures paid £300,000 for the film rights - all on the basis of Jenkins' sample chapters.
"For a first book, based on a few chapters, £600,000 would be unreasonable," says Louise Moore at Penguin, in what sounds like a contender for Understatement of the Year. In fact, the advance was the most controversial in publishing since the fuss that blew up around Martin Amis's novel The Information. But even Amis, a man often described as "Britain's greatest living author", only got half-a-million dollars, a mere £325,000.For Jenkins, it must all have seemed like a dream come true. But, as any author knows, good stories contain a twist in the tale - and it was when Jenkins finally sat down to finish the novel that her problems really began. The book was finally handed over but, for all her efforts, it failed to deliver what everyone had wanted and expected - a better, sassier version of This Life. "There was a mismatch between the collective expectations and her ability to produce," says the leading literary agent, Patrick Walsh. Instead of being the "great work" for which Hodder had paid a small fortune, HoneyMoon "was almost like a celebrity novel.
Like if Carol Vorderman wrote her first novel, very much that sort of feeling."The reviews were terrible, even when you make allowance for a fair degree of schadenfreude. "She makes Bridget Jones read like Tacitus," said the London Evening Standard. "Written in an artificial 'golly gosh' way, it manages to be both self-regarding and trite", said the Mail on Sunday. "This book has all the depth of a paddling pool with a leak," complained The Observer. "HoneyMoon is superficial, manipulative, sentimental and trashy," agreed The Sunday Telegraph.
Even the plot - about a woman reunited with her true love, while on honeymoon with someone else - turned out to be a straight lift from Noël Coward's Private Lives.But that was just the critics. Now the readers are having their say - and, four months after the book's launch, it seems that for once they agree with the reviewers. Figures just released show that HoneyMoon has sold just 19,500 copies in bookshops, while My Life on a Plate by the columnist India Knight sold 18,000 last month alone. The research organisation BookTrack confirms that former journalist Jane Green's Bookends is also selling more than four times as well as HoneyMoon, having shifted 94,000 copies since its paperback launch in May.And it is getting worse. HoneyMoon last week sold a dismal 341 copies in the nation's bookshops, and was only 362nd in BookTrack's paperback rankings (leaving out all the Harry Potters).
