Mount!

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Why do you think Jilly did it? Have read a few interviews with her recently - the Camilla Long one in the times was particularly interesting. While Jilly Cooper tried to write this novel, her husband's fight with Parkinson's disease began to be lost over three years until his death. Jilly herself had hip surgery from which to recover, and two of her beloved elderly pets also passed away, leaving her with a single dog. She writes gratefully of the reception that she received at various farms and races, as well as thanking her son who contributed with his research. I felt, however, that Jilly just didn't have the vim and vigour to pursue any social commentary to any degree in this story; I think that she was tired. Spoiler alert!*** One of the prevailing themes of the books is Rupert's love for Taggie, and his faithfulness to her. In this book he cheats on her, and it seems so random. There is no believable reason, the person he sleeps with isn't likeable, there is no built up basis that makes the events understandable. It's like Jilly just threw it in there for excitement. ***Spoiler Alert over***

Mount! - Penguin Books UK Mount! - Penguin Books UK

I haven't read the whole book and I probably won't. I am terrified of being outed here, because that really would be faintmakingly awful, but all I can say is: Class was published in 1979. “All I could claim was a passionate interest in the subject and, being unashamedly middle class, I was perhaps more or less equidistant from bottom and top,” Cooper wrote in a later introduction, admitting that it caused a “fearful rumpus” at the time. And are we now meant to assume that Gala and Gav stay living 100 m away from Taggie and Rupert and it is all fine.The national /racial /xenophobic stereotypes are getting ever more cringe worthy and if you're female you've still got to loose weight to get your man. Oh, gosh! I’m so old, I don’t know about Tinder and dating apps. Isn’t Tinder the one that has something called ‘likes’? I’m sure Rupert, Billy and Rannaldini would get lots of those. Today I read about speed-dating, that you have to decide whether you want to get off with someone in four minutes. In my day, we had the four-minute-mile and admired Roger Bannister hugely for achieving it. Today you have four-minute-males! I don’t think Rupert would need to bother with the Internet because women are always throwing themselves at him. I think you are correct Lanaor. In the Camilla Long interview there was quite a bit about how she'd had to support her family pretty much always - well Leo I mean. When I wrote Jump! – my last novel, about jump racing, which is known as the winter game – I fell so in love with the racing community that I decided to switch to flat racing which mostly takes place in the summer. The result is Mount! Although Rupert won the Grand National at the end of Jump! with a little mare called Mrs Wilkinson, his yard contains mostly flat horses, so it seemed logical to carry on with him as the hero. But that’s just an excuse. In reality, I adore Rupert. He’s so glamorous, outrageous, appallingly behaved and does exactly what he likes, and my readers seem to like him too. He also has adopted children, and adores dogs, as I do, and is wildly unpolitically correct, so I can use him to voice all my own prejudices! And if he is an implacable enemy, he is a loyal friend, and he’s devastated at the end of Jump! by the death of his life-long companion, Billy Lloyd-Foxe, who always had a stabilizing and humanizing effect on Rupert’s behaviour.

Jilly Cooper - Wikipedia Jilly Cooper - Wikipedia

Rupert is consumed by one obsession: that Love Rat, his adored grey horse, be proclaimed champion stallion. He longs to trounce Roberto’s Revenge, the stallion owned by his detested rival Cosmo Rannaldini, which means abandoning his racing empire at Penscombe and his darling wife Taggie, and chasing winners in the richest races worldwide, from Dubai to Los Angeles to Melbourne. There is a problem with the Jilly Cooper as feminism argument though. It requires you to have not read this book. But... Too many characters, too many plots many of which seemed to be dropped or sloppily resolved (l was sure Bao' s sister was going to pop up and the Wang plot ended up not really going anywhere after Gala's fainting fit.)I’ve always adored horses and, in writing Mount!, I’ve been privileged to meet some of the finest in the world. The great Frankel, for example, is turning out to be as wonderful a sire as he was racehorse, and lives with a lovely tabby cat friend called George. I have also shaken hooves with gentle Gallileo in Ireland, who has been leading sire for the past seven years. Equally excitingly, I went to the World Cup in Dubai, which takes place in the desert under an indigo sky, where the top horses race for multi-million prizes. After some amazing fireworks, all the stars come down to cheer on the equine stars. It is so romantic. I did suspect that there had been so gentle age massaging with regards to Rupert approaching sixty and his grandson, Young Eddie, aged twenty-three, but who cares if a few years have been lost along the way? Your characters are all so well drawn, and not just the two-legged characters! Were there any special animals who inspired you in writing this novel? I mentioned this on the other thread - I'm sure the ages are all messed up, Rupert has to be more than 57. Her columns were eventually collected into a book, Jolly Super – a title which still sums up her approach to life. But before that, in the late 60s, came How to Stay Married. “It was an incredibly vain thing to do really. I’d only been married seven years. But it was fun,” Cooper says. “Leo said it ought to be called How to Get Divorced – I was doing the Sunday Times column, had a new baby, and this book to write. It was too much, far too much. Anyway I did it. Now it’s terribly politically incorrect, the fact you had to cherish your husband, run home and cook him dinner, try and work 8.30-4.30 so he wouldn’t see you doing housework. But it was the time I was in. It seems awful.” I always liked those hunky, rather forceful men

Jilly Cooper: ‘People were always coming up to us at parties Jilly Cooper: ‘People were always coming up to us at parties

Rupert's dream is to have his beloved Thoroughbred stallion, Love Rat, declared leading sire. His main competition is the fiendish Cosmo Ranaldini and his horse, Roberto's Revenge. While he's flying all over the world to enter his horses in the richest races of the entire globe, things at home are being overseen by his stable manager Gav (who is of course a genius with horses but tormented in love), the nurse for his increasingly senile father Eddie, Gala (of course she is also a genius with horses AND a tormented widow) and a host of other characters (most of whom are geniuses with horses and unhappy in love). Notice a theme here? In the meantime, someone appears to be sabotaging Penscombe and the horses. It also implied her marriage wasn't that brilliant and I wonder if she therefore just couldn't let Rupert and Taggie live happily ever after - or without him shagging the vile Gala. For regular readers of Cooper's novels I am sure that many characters played major roles in previous books in the series.

Either way, Mount! appears after more of a gap than the author usually troubles her fans with. Her husband of 52 years, Leo Cooper, died in 2013 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease. “So I was very slow,” she says. She wrote it all right. And under horrible circumstances she did brilliantly. But I suspect the editors never got a chance to make raw Jilly sound like real Jilly. Rupert is consumed by one obsession: that Love Rat, his adored grey horse, be proclaimed champion stallion. He longs to trounce Roberto's Revenge, the stallion owned by his detested rival Cosmo Rannaldini, which means abandoning his racing empire at Penscombe and his darling wife Taggie, and chasing winners in the richest races worldwide, from Dubai to Los Angeles to Melbourne. Speaking of authors most loved, the opening scene of Mount! features Rupert’s great-great-great-great-grandfather in a thrilling race across the country, which will remind many of Georgette Heyer’s wonderful romances. Was it fun writing historical fiction for a change?