Pandora

Rutshire Chronicles #7

by Jilly Cooper

No picture ever came more beautiful than Raphael's Pandora...Discovered by a dashing young lieutenant, Raymond Kelvedon in a Normandy Chateau in 1944, she had cast her spell over his family - all artists and dealers - for fifty years.Hanging in a turret of their lovely Cotswold house, Pandora witnessed Raymond's tempestuous wife Galena both entertaining a string of lovers, and giving birth to her four Jupiter, Alizarin, Jonathan and superbrat Sienna. Then an exquisite stranger rolls up, claiming to be a long-lost daughter of the family, setting the three Belvedon brothers at each other's throats. Accompanying her is her fatally glamorous boyfriend, whose very different agenda includes an unhealthy interest in the Raphael.When the painting is stolen during a fireworks party, the police are called and a global search ensues to discover once and for all who stole the masterpiece and who it actually belongs to. Will passionate love triumph, and will Pandora be restored to her rightful home? ----------------------------------'Cooper's sheer exuberance and energy are contagious' The Times'The whole thing is a riot - vastly superior to anything else in a glossy cover' Daily Telegraph'This is Jilly on top form with her most sparkling novel to date' Evening Standard'One reads her for her joie de vivre, her maudlin romanticism, her love of arty references and her razor sharp sense of humour. Oh, and the sex' New Statesman

Genres: Fiction, Romance, Chick Lit, British Literature, Contemporary, Humor, Adult

753 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Dame Jilly Cooper, OBE (born February 21, 1937) was an English author. She started her career as a journalist and wrote numerous works of non-fiction before writing several romance novels, the first of which appeared in 1975. She was most famous for writing the six blockbuster novels the Rutshire Chronicles.

Reviews

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

A definite improvement on Score and Appassionata, it feels like Jilly is heading back to her best with this story. Great characters, absolutely loved Galena, I can understand why Raymond was so besotted! Lovely to see a cameo from Hermione too, I thought we might have seen the last of her in the previous book. What I love about Jilly's work is there's such a great sense of fun, it really lifts me from the realities of everyday life.

[Amanda Patterson · Rating 3 out of 5]

All those Riders, Rivals & Polo fans out there will be pleased to know that Jilly Cooper is getting back into the groove with “Pandora”. I was ready to dismiss this book on the mediocrity of ‘Appassionata’ and the sheer awfulness of ‘Score’.

However, in ‘Pandora’, Ms Cooper takes us on a thrilling roller-coaster ride into the jet-set art world of Raymond Belvedon. Raymond stole a painting of Pandora by Raphael from a chateau in France when he was a subaltern in World War 2. The plot follows the fate of the painting and the fate of the colourful Belvedon clan.

The 1st Mrs Belvedon, Galina, died a tragic, mysterious death. She seemed to spend most of her time on the bed beneath the painting of Pandora either giving birth or entertaining lovers at their home, Foxes Court. The 2nd, Anthea, is the wife who comes complete with a pair of gorgeous twins.

Raymond’s 4 grown–up children, the manipulative, Jupiter, the loner, Alizarin, the womanising painter, Jonathan and the bratty, bitchy artist Sienna are all involved in the art world. A beautiful sculptor, Emerald, and her delicious boyfriend, the Jewish American Zac, intrude into the Belvedon world. She claims to be Raymond’s long-lost daughter. Zac seems to have an unhealthy interest in the painting of Pandora. Add long-standing rival and former protege, David Pulborough to the mix of characters and we’re set up for the intrigue and that follows.

The painting of Pandora is stolen. We’re taken to Vienna, Geneva, Paris, New York & London in the effort to retrieve it. Will the painting be restored to its rightful owner? A tense court case and a sale at Sotheby’s decides the outcome.

The art world seems a perfect fit for a Jilly Cooper styled novel. The artists, dealers and gallery owners are perfect fodder for the biting Cooper pen and wit. Their greed, rivalry, duplicity and seeming lack of moral conscience are the key to Ms Cooper’s characterization. I enjoyed the wilful artist Sienna, Raymond’s daughter – she should have been given more space in the book.

The book will satisfy most Jilly Cooper fans. It’s escapist fun, well done. I think we expect too much from her after the brilliance of Riders, Rivals & Co. Not every book can be as good. I’d give it a go – if you can put ‘Score’ out of your mind.

[Gary Branson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just what the doctor ordered during stay-at-home guidelines. Fun, entertaining, easy read with a great cast of characters. Happy ending-ish, with Cooper’s signature style and tropes. Not published in the US unfortunately.

[Dangermousie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ahh, good old Jilly Cooper and her delightful thick volumes of misbehaving upper class Brits. This was the last of her Chronicles series that I haven't read yet, and what a delight it was. Pandora revolves around the artistic and dysfunctional Belvedon family. There is the father - the charming, generous, and oddly put-upon Raymond, the paterfamilias, who runs a famous art gallery. There are the mothers - the first wife Galina, as unsuitable a wife and mother as she was a genius painter, and the second wife Althea - much younger and obsessed with status. And then there is the Belvedon brood - the small children - Dicky and Dora - twins and the youngest; and the adults - all from Raymond's first wife - Jupiter, the oldest, who is ambitious and cold (though he has a small chink in his armor for his ilustrator wife Hanna), Alizarin (who I totally loved), who is a genius painter even if unmarketable and seriously is a total woobie and Alizarin/Sophie = awww and etc etc, Jonathan - the infant terrible of the art world, who likes to make out with his sister Serena in public for shocking people kicks, but who actually might be an amazing artist and a good person if he ever bothers to grow up. There is the messed up Serena, talented and screwed up. Oh, and there is also Emerald - a talented sculptor who was adopted out but discovers as an adult that Althea is her mother and Raymond is her father. Did I mention that Jonathan/Emerald are an OTP? They fall for each other when they don't believe they are related only - ooops. I view it as karmic punishment for Jonathan for playacting at falling for a sister to then genuinely fall in love with one and know he can't have her. (pssst - not a spoiler, it turns out they are not really related and happy endings abound). And there is the painting of Raphael's Pandora presiding over this mess of a family - a painting that may or may not be stolen. This is no great work of literary art but it's ridiculous fun, and Jonathan/Emerald satisfied all my cravings for angst and shipping anf fakecest. (Plus, they actually grew up, yay!)

[Kel Sta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only Jilly Cooper writes a good Jilly Cooper. Her books are peopled with rich casts of multi-faceted characters whose lives intersect to varying degrees. To make her characters more interesting (and the storylines more lively), they are often preoccupied with sex, rarely want for money in the long term, and are usually really good at one thing or another (sometimes more than one thing), as well as being exceptionally good-looking. Nevertheless, the characters retain their realism: they are moody, imperfect, sometimes smart-mouthed (she's a punny lass, our Jilly), sometimes lost for words, and always moving through the chaotic and never-ending multitude of sensory input that is life.

'Pandora' is set irreverently in the art world. Characters from Cooper's previous novels make appearances here and there, contributing to the current plot, in a way that gives the fan a warm feeling of coming home, but does not lose those for whom this is their first taste of Cooper county. References to poetry and other works of arts crop up frequently too.

The novel's ending could perhaps be seen as a little predictable and too good to be true, but I think that is true to Jilly's heart, where romance is alive and relatively well, though a little diseased due to a rich diet.

[DeB · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you enjoy broad satire, have a bit of a clue about the British class system and are open to novels that lead you on goose trails with hijinks and shenanigans all the way to a neatly and delightful ending, you can't do better than Jilly Cooper. Her books are, to use the English expression, "a lark ", filled with high comedy, pretentious snobs, salt of the earth types, love stories, romps, successes and rightful devastation of the villains in the plot. The plot, however, is always so serpentine that the reader is usually kept guessing until the end. Farcical fun!

[Laura..devouring books like crumpets · Rating 3 out of 5]

Usually i love Jilly cooper the rutshire chronicles up to this book were awesome, I love horses, we had stables when i was a kid..... Music i kind of get the jist.... But art.... I had no clue... what shapes what what looks good, some of the weirdest paintings people see feelings..... i cant... so really didn't understand what they were all going on about... still some likable, some cantankerous and some outrageous characters that make this a fun read

[Char · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book with my friend and it was a lovely experience, with laughter and sadness. It's a good story, with fun and frolics as well as some more serious storylines. It's a bit unrealistic and some parts were a bit too weird (incest) and I can't stand Cooper's descriptions of larger women. Some of this is outdated and it has a tendency to waffle on (especially with descriptions of flowers and plants!). But I enjoyed the characters and overall plot.

[Dark-Draco · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the Rutshire Chronicles that I hadn't read and enjoyed it as much as the rest. It begins during the 2nd World War, where Raymond Belvedon is reeling after hearing of the death of his older brother. He enters a burning chateau and finds an exquisite painting of Pandora and the Seven Deadly Sins, which he steals. After the war, he meets a young artist, Maria, and marries her, but she is continuly unfaithful and tests his great patience. He also takes on a young apprentice, David, who is craftier then he lets on. Maria dies, leaving Raymond and three children. David leaves to start a rival gallery and then the action cuts forward. Raymond's children and step children are a confused bunch, especially when Emerald, a young woman, crashes a party and insists she's also one of the family. But her boyfriend, Zac, has ulterior motives for wanting to get into the house, and it is all to do with Pandora. When the painting goes missing, the police are called and a global search ensues to find out once and for all who it actually belongs to. Along the way, love is lost and found, ending up all nice and happy as you would expect from one of Cooper's books.

I loved the tension over the painting, the history behind it and how it all comes out in court. I was kind of let down by the ending. Although 'nice', I don't believe in Zac's sudden turn around. It was good to see David get his comeuppance - he was definatley a horrid little character. A great read, one I may return to again before it sets off on its travels.

[Minty McBunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first time I read this entry in the Rutshire Chronicles, I didn’t love it as much the previous books. However, it has grown on me over the years and now I have a real affection for the characters, (most of them, Emerald, much like Abby Rosen, irritates me to no end) especially the ones we continue to see in the future like Dicky & Dora and the Cartwrights. The story has a lot of threads but is tied up neatly with a big spangly bow at the happy ending.

I do admit that Visitor’s storyline never fails to bring me to tears. Visitor is what takes Pandora from a 4 to 5 star book for me.

[Miriam · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was really up for some good, trashy, bonkbuster fun - but this was just crap. There were occasional glimpses of actual humour (the dull army General known as 'General Anaesthetic,') which suggest that Cooper is capable of wit- but barely any of it is on display in this dull, baggy epic. It commits the sin of being boring, which is unforgivable in this kind of novel. It's loaded with art references as though that bestows a kind of cultural seriousness (of which, more below), but the novel is just dumb. Lines like 'You have such a great body' are supposed to be classy, sexy pillow-talk. Careless writing (piles of papers 'rising in stalactites') is everywhere here, and there's a general meandering formlessness to the plot. Both trashy and (worse) pretentious, this was a slog.

I would usually just give this a 2-stars, but it's getting 1 because I found actually mean-spirited and borderline offensive - all the more annoyingly so, because it had pretensions to profundity in terms of its treatment of the Holocaust and looted art. Cooper seems (as demonstrated by her sincere author's note at the end) to think she is actually engaging with the topic of the Holocaust in a meaningful way. But while it ostensibly has some sympathy for the Jewish victims of Nazi looting, the Jewish character fits nearly every stereotype - a smooth, perpetual outsider, routinely depicted in animalistic terms. He may ultimately be redeemed but of all the bad behaviour in a novel full of it, his is depicted as the most calculating, the most despicable. And the sheer bad taste of likening the loss of a painting to the Holocaust itself (in the mind of descendants of Holocaust victims, no less) is just grotesque: 'Her howl of anguish when they dragged Pandora away in New York had haunted him like his mom’s imagined scream when her own mother was dragged off to Auschwitz.' Similarly, the process of being cross-examined in court is described thus: 'it was as if SS guards were systematically kicking Zac to death with their jackboots.' This imagery litters the book; the son of a wealthy family who, entirely voluntarily, goes to live on the streets, is described in similar terms: 'Alizarin could have been any one of the Holocaust victims Jonathan had been reading about so obsessively in Vienna.' Cooper relies on the Holocaust as a lazy trope to depict suffering, whilst actually being weirdly anti-semitic. Notably, when the crowd at an art auction is described, other attendees are described by their nationality ('Americans', 'Italians', 'Germans' and 'Danes') but the Jews are described just as Jews (perpetuating the insidious notion of Jews as perpetually loyal only to themselves, never belonging anywhere) - and, of course, their interests are financial: 'A great many Jews, their big hands seldom leaving their wives’ glittery shoulders, were there, less to bid than to see the financial outcome of one of the first looted art cases.' I don't know what possessed Cooper to think that this dull and sordid novel was the place to tackle the topic of the Holocaust - but she's done it with extremely bad taste and a hint of anti-semitism.

The class stuff was gross too. I was ready for Cooper to idealise the upper classes - she ostensibly parodies them and depicts their (many) foibles but really she loves them, forgives them anything, justifies their endless bad behaviour, and fetishises their wealth. Fine - it could function as a kind of consumerist-porn, in which we're meant to be wowed by Rupert Cambell-Black and his helicopter, and to feel pity for a family that might be forced to sell a few of their valuable paintings to balance out their finances. So far, so predictable. But, again, what tips this over from the crass into the properly annoying is the novel's pretensions of actually engaging with the question of poverty, through the sainted Alizarin's (self-inflicted) descent into homelessness and near-starvation. While this is supposed to make us empathise with the poor, instead it reveals Cooper's grotesque attitudes: 'He had made friends since he had been on the streets, not with work-shy scroungers, but quietly desperate people who, like himself, had lost their way in life.' (A charitable interpretation might be that she is mocking the stereotype of work-shy scroungers; however, given the other attitudes on display in the book, it's more realistic to read this as saying that there are work-shy scroungers amongst the homeless, but Alizarin has befriended only 'the deserving poor.' After all, the book notes that 'Tramps were always getting drunk or stoned, and picking fights' - despite the fact that this is literally the exact behaviour of the toffs throughout the book. (Again, you might charitably claim that this irony is deliberate - I'm not convinced). Alizarin is, of course, swept from poverty and illness back to the bosom of his wealthy family. Everyone behaves terribly, of course, but the novel's main villain (apart, of course, from the avaricious Jew), is the working-class-lad-made-good, who is shown to be a ghastly social-climber who never fits in, despite acquiring wealth and success. This is dyed-in-the-wool conservatism, in which the bad behaviour of the rich is eccentric and amusing, and ultimately redeemed, and the bad behaviour of the working-class man is a true sign of his bad character.

I would've loved to have enjoyed this book - or even to have found it a dumb but mindless romp. Instead it really pissed me off - it was nasty-minded, stupid and tasteless.

[Joey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do not know how to classify this book. But it is such a page-turner. I could not put in down after Part 2.
All the characters are so distinguished. It might be confusing at first and latter you will find each of them memorable.
I wish I were a great painter and my boyfriend will be as gorgeous and talented as the artists in the story.
I hope a sequel will come up.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a profound work of quickening insight, however, it's ridiculously enjoyable and a real slice of "England", the one that only exists in novels and films. Perfect for the beach and absurdly entertaining!

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Jilly Cooper. I was so excited to read this and I wasn't disappointed. Once again she delivers an array of interesting characters, some that Jilly fans are already fans of!
The story involving art, makes for an interesting plot and the ending is one that leaves you happy!

[Mimi · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a disappointment, holy hell. I had read Wicked! and it was hilarious, but I'm only a 100 pages into Pandora and I already want to drown myself. Can't continue. This novel is recommended for people who like absurd, nonsensical bullshit dramas.

[Seadaz]

Took awhile to get into this one and warm to some of the characters, but about the time that Emerald made herself known to her family was when it started to get interesting to me.

Not as good as the Rutshire Chronicles - still a good read though.

[Marren · Rating 2 out of 5]

Listen, I remember blushing when I read some parts of this story. If you are looking for a complicated family drama, then read this one. Geez, talk about weird family issues that their good looks cannot save them from.

[Victoria Evangelina Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I was skipping a few gossip-filled pages here and there, I admit that the end of this book is better than the beginning, and all the twists and turns make me admire the author and gave the book a very solid four-star rating. This would make a great beach read.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a great english holiday read!

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jilly is back on form really great read. Wonderful characters. Nice twist so glad things are better.

[Deeze · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although my least favorite book, still a read I would whole heartedly reccomend. Just took me slightly longer to get into the story with this one.

[Tasneem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oooo... Cooper is a star. I loved this book. The people are so bad, that you can't help but love them.

[Roxie Gallinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

ANOTHER JILLY COOPERS FINIST

[Bambin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possible my favourite Jilly Cooper book ever, if that's possible because I love them all.

[Abi Fuller-gardener · Rating 3 out of 5]

The only one of her books I haven't read more than once. Hard to read. Might attempt it again soon.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joint best Jilly Cooper book ever (alongside Wicked).

[Lili · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not particularly fond of some of the content of Jilly Cooper's novels but she writes a good story.

[Rachel Kidd · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd definately got over my Jilly Cooper phase by the time I'd read this book. It was the last one I ever read. Maybe I'll get back into her work again one day though.

[Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

i loved this book. the twists and turns it tkes you down keeps you in suspence right until the end. a true author

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I started reading it I realized that I had read it before