Stephanie Jones: Book Review - A Vintage Wedding by Katie Fforde

A Vintage Wedding, Katie Fforde’s novel of love and friendship in the Cotswolds, sets its trajectory with an atypical meet-cute. Thirty-five-year-old accountant Rachel is new in town, Lindy a single mother of two and Beth a web designer who currently works as a barmaid and has taken up residence in a home owned by her sister’s soon-to-be in-laws in exchange for organizing the wedding. Within an hour of their chance first meeting the women have bonded, and conceived a new business venture that blends their skills and forgives a lack of seed funding: planning vintage weddings.

It betrays no twist of plot to say that each woman finds a romantic as well as a professional purpose in the course of A Vintage Wedding’s somewhat excessive 450 pages. Divorcee Rachel, older and more set in her ways than the other women, lives a life of order and control that was suggested by her ex-husband to be driven by obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Fforde dwells on these temperamental manifestations at length: the agonies Rachel endures when forced to admit others into her pristine home; her clench-jawed determination to view spending time with a new acquaintance, in a house cluttered with collectibles, as therapeutic. This acquaintance, Belinda, is in possession of a substantial estate, an aristocratic accent and an adult son, Raff, whose roguery is legendary and much disapproved of among the village populace, but seemingly cured overnight once Rachel appears on the scene.

In the context of the novel, Beth and Lindy are lesser lights than Rachel, their problems a matter of circumstance rather than psychology. Both are interesting and appealing, if limited in dimension. Lindy has made a good fist of early motherhood, having become pregnant as a teenager to a boy who retreated into the bosom of a well-to-do family that regards Lindy as beneath them. Though not that far beneath, in the fullness of time – when said boy’s architect brother Angus becomes the new owner of a crumbling farmhouse in the village, he wants to see a lot of his nephews, and particularly their mother. Of the trio of flirtations that drives the narrative, the Lindy-Angus match is both the messiest and the most natural.

As they do for her friends, all impediments in Beth’s path to true love prove brittle. When an early romantic candidate, the “considerate and fit” brother of Vintage Weddings’ first client, proves to be not only inconsiderate but a right bounder, the door merely opens for an even more dashing suitor.

A Vintage Wedding is filled with ardour of a very chaste kind, Fforde favouring romance over raunch and subjecting one character to prolonged self-flagellation over whether she slept with the object of her affection too soon. Though the premise has a saccharine appeal, the execution is somewhat ponderous, and the story is best enjoyed as a light, undemanding confection.