I’ve had a copy of Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot sitting on my shelf for the best part of a year now because its extreme fluffiness was actually preventing me from reading it. I don’t mean it kept floating out of my hands – although it’s such a light read I’m surprised it didn’t – but there was something just a little bit too frivolous about it. In Brideshead Revisited there’s a bit when Anthony Blanche describes Sebastian’s conversation as “a little sphere of soapsuds drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then – "phut! – vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing” and I felt this way about reading Sorcery and Cecelia: that it was pretty enough, at first glance, but ultimately rather a waste of my time.

And then I went on holiday.

And Sorcery and Cecilia became the perfect reading material.

It’s a Regency-set (Regency with magic!) epistolary novel that arose from a version of the “letter game” played by the two authors. For anyone who hasn’t been a 14 year old year girl, the letter game consists of an exchange of letters between two connected but separated characters, yet neither of the writers may divulge the plot to the other. Kate and Cecelia are cousins (although truthfully their family tree always struck me as a bit dodgy): Kate has gone off to London to have her first season, whereas Cecy has been left behind in the country. At first their letters are mainly girl talk but then Kate is nearly poisoned by chocolate from an enchanted pot and a new young lady shows up in Cecy’s neighbourhood and all the men immediately fall in love with her. Needless to say, something is Up, the heroines are Entangled and, whodathunkit, the two plot strands are Connected.

I understand that although the bulk of the text came out of the letter game, the two authors did collaborate near the end in order to bring the story to a satisfying and coherent conclusion and polish up the piece as a whole. The effect of this is more the equivalent of a lick of paint here and there, a new lampshade and some throw cushions than a fundamental restructuring of the text. Ultimately it’s still a book that was built on the letters game (i.e sand): the plot doesn’t really make any sense, the pacing is screwed, there are long, clumsy exposition sequences, and things connect up because the form demands it rather than because it feels as though they plausibly do. The characterisation is wobbly, not helped by the necessary self-absorption of any tale told in letters. The heroines struck me as basically interchangeable spirited young women, albeit endearing ones, the villains are made out of cardboard and the heroes have no characteristics whatsoever apart from being heroes.

But still.

If you’re in the mood for it (or on holiday) and you enjoy this kind of book, Sorcery and Cecelia is a lot of fun. It’s riddled with flaws – some more serious than others – but it’s written with wit and enthusiasm and it’s so damned sweet and fluffy that not liking it would feel like spurning a kitten. I suspect there has been little research beyond the pages of Georgette Heyer but the authors manage to create the right sort atmosphere and their valiant stabs at the language are generally reasonably convincing. Occasionally attempts to deploy the cant of the day fall horribly flat (by the halfway point I was starting to think that if another one of them wrote that something was “the outside of enough” I would bite my own arm off) and the major historical figure name-dropping gets wearying very quickly. I know it’s alt-history, what with the magic and the sorcerers and everything, but the social setting is presented as equivalent to that we could expect from a Jane Austen novel. This being so, it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever that Lady Jersey would bother herself, let alone be on moderately familiar terms with a young lady of Elizabeth Bennet’s social class. There are also frequent references to the scandalous affair between Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb which, I believe, reached in zenith in 1812, whereas Sorcery and Cecelia is set quite specifically in 1817, when Caro was in the middle of giving birth to a Byronic bastard and Byron himself had fucked off to Rome.

I probably shouldn’t nitpick. And, to be fair, most of the negativity in this review comes from the reflections of the morning after the night before. I did very much enjoy Sorcery and Cecelia at the time of reading it (stretched on the lawns of Hofberg, beneath a bright sun). It even made me giggle aloud on a couple of occasions:

“Then I realized Oliver was not merely standing, mute as a block, at my elbow, but was staring--positively gaping--at the Marquis.
The Marquis glanced from me to Oliver and said, almost too solicitously, 'Are you feeling quite well, Mr. Rushton?'
'Oh--quite well, thank you,' replied Oliver, coloring up. 'Only--I was admiring the way you tie your cravat. What do you call that fashion?'
The Marquis regarded Oliver with bland composure. 'I call it "the way I tie my cravat."'

Sorcery and Cecelia is full of mischievous, arch little moments like this. It makes for a gently entertaining and charming read, as long as you don’t expect anything too much from it. In short, it’s a perfect holiday book, or perhaps a diversion for a lazy Sunday afternoon – a bubble, but little more, although sometimes a bubble is precisely what you want.