Marian Keyes's fourth novel is already a bestseller, and the two magical factors responsible for this are word-of-mouth sales and a solid fan-base. Last Chance Saloon is the story of three just-thirty friends, and of what happens when one of them becomes seriously ill. A decade ago, school-friends Tara, Katherine, and Fintan left Co. Clare for London, and the novel is a snapshot of this generation. Their lives are dominated by excesses of alcohol, shopping and sex. Fintan is gloriously settled with his Italian boyfriend, but both Katherine and Tara are damaged women, each neurotically enduring "maintenance-level misery."
Katherine is rigidly self-sufficient and terrified of being dependent. Tara is equally terrified of being alone, and immerses herself in romance: she has a full-on love affair with food, though relations with her long-standing boyfriend are poor. Both women are conscious that they repeat patterns, but not enough to make them stop when confronted with chips, designer labels or another in a series of worthless, egotistical men. Desperate for lasting relationships, Katherine and Tara are alarmed to find themselves in the "last-chance saloon" of thirty-plus. However, everything changes when one of their lives is threatened, and the friends are forced to abandon their absurd self-deceptions and reconsider the meaning of "last chance." In an amusing twist on the theme of a character who grows and matures in the face of serious illness, Keyes's death-bed character turns into a manipulative, emotional blackmailer, re-organising the lives of the others. Keyes is a warm-hearted and witty writer, funny about incompatibilities and cleverly drawing friendships in crisis. Her novels deliver laugh-out-loud moments, such as when one of these characters quips that the Knockavoy version of foreplay is "Brace yourself there, Bridie," or when Tara's diet blow-out ends with her drunkenly scoffing chips on an electric toning table. Keyes's jokey style of wisecracks and one-liners works because of her accomplished and affectionate invention of characters, and much of the comedy plays out in the idiom in which the women deflate their own trendiness and cosmopolitan lifestyles - you feel you could hang out in the pub with them. Like her earlier novels, Last Chance Sa- loon has a high feel-good factor, but it is not all laughs. It is about small redemptions gained through the realisation that the past cannot be repaired, but only accepted - with an added bonus tip about finding a truly indelible lipstick.