The One Plus One

St Just Thursday Evening Reading Group 4th January 2024.

The One Plus One. Jojo Moyes.

The group saw this book as ‘easy reading’, very predictable, a good book for the Christmas holidays, with a ‘packaged’ fairy-tale ending – but not nearly as good as The Giver of Stars, which the group read a few years ago.

That said, we did agree that it had accessible characters and a believable story (for the most part). It also had moral points to make: Jess brought up her children to think that if you do the right thing and lead a moral life, all will be well. This viewpoint came into question as events unfolded, and was also complicated by the fact that both Jess and Ed committed crimes; Ed sat in judgement upon Jess for stealing his money, until his sister pointed out that he himself was on trial for insider trading, and he came to see things differently. Another moral question was Jess and her friend’s finding of valuable jewellery in the flat they were cleaning, and how this led not to grateful thanks and a kind reward, but to the pair of cleaners losing their jobs for this client.

After discussion, we came to the opinion that perhaps the characters and their actions were a little too binary: Jess’s first husband was an all-round bad hat with very few redeeming features, while Ed was positively saintly in taking on Jess and her whole family for an extended and uncomfortable road-trip instead of just giving them all the money for train-fares. We talked about how, or why, Ed got into trouble by involving himself in insider trading – was he solely a techie, a ‘nerd’, who understood his own work but not the business implications of it, or was he merely naive?

The book also gave a realistic portrayal of some social issues, painting convincing pictures of urban poverty and bullying, including cyber-bullying. Arising out of this we discussed the way in which people’s lives can be so easily and quickly ruined, from one moment to the next. Also we noticed that this book was published in 2014, and we thought that many things had deteriorated since then: aspects of bullying and victimisation of minorities has worsened, we thought, and so have instances of social injustice. A lot of interesting discussion from what initially appeared to be merely a ‘light read’!