The First Golfing Bonkbuster?

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick of the amount of sexually aggressive glamour models hanging out at golf clubs these days. They’re everywhere, aren’t they? Sitting on the veranda overlooking the eighteenth fairway, gossiping about their forthcoming reality TV commitments and the head pro’s clandestine drug dealing. Sneaking into the janitor’s cupboards, seducing the part-time pro shop helper. Racing across the course in buggies wearing undersized tube tops, ruining the herbaceous borders and pushing one another into water hazards. I mean, really. What happened to the good old days, when you could count on the female members of your golf club to be over the age of fifty-five and blend innocuously into the background in a selection of modest woollen garments?

These, at least, seem to be the concerns of the members at St Benedict’s, the exclusive fictional Cheshire spa course that forms the backdrop to Leonie Fox’s new novel Private Members (Penguin, £6.99). “Half the male membership at St Benedict’s only joined so they could drool over all the pretty girls wafting around the place – and, God knows, there are plenty of them,” explains one female character early in the book. In the two decades since I first took up the game, I’ve heard many reasons given for joining golf clubs - proximity to one’s home, a particularly challenging dogleg eighteenth, good practice facilities – but I have to admit that this is a new one on me.

Of course, it is not that young, golf-mad men don’t appreciate young, fame-mad blonde women of the type that might pose for Nuts or Zoo Magazine, nor is it that they wouldn’t put getting to know them right up there next to “get new Nike Sumo SasQuatch driver!” towards the top of their list of life priorities. Neither is it that this type of woman is never known, in the quasi-evolved golfing environment of the 21st century, to be found in the vicinity of golfers. It is just that, WPGA and LPGA tour excepted, seeing a young woman of any kind hitting – or watching the hitting of – a golf ball remains a rare sight. It’s a bit like going for a country walk on a crisp autumn morning and seeing a red squirrel skip in front of your feet. It should happen more often, and you feel certain that life would be a lot more balanced and rosy if it did, but, because the world is a cruel and senseless place, it doesn’t.

Bearing this in mind, one can look at Private Members – a book all about women, most of whom are young, and what they get up to at their golf club - in two ways. The first is as a shallow, contrived attempt to transfer Footballers Wives’ to the fairway, or a kind of modern British equivalent to Jackie Collins’ Rock Star, with soft lob wedges instead of phallic guitars. The second is to commend it on the sheer far-fetched ambition of its subject matter – in the way that you might commend, say, a sci-fi epic set on a planet ruled by giant ants and with a molten core made of pure toasted waffle.

Taking the latter outlook, I could just about live with the melodrama of a teaching pro who moonlights as a gigolo and a tour pro who gets his female conquests to shout “Hole in one!” during sex, but even having accepted that I was in an unrealistic world, I found myself questioning some of the details. Would St Benedict’s, a course “set in 200 acres of prime Cheshire parkland”, really have been permitted onto the links-only British Open rota in the first place, let alone have played host to the tournament ten times? In one scene, we find the club’s Head Caretaker complaining to the trophy engraver about the club’s resident touring pro, Sam Bentley, winning all the club’s amateur competitions, but, given the strict rules regarding amateur status, let alone the tournament commitments of a player ranked 52nd in the world, such a scenario strikes me as unlikely. Later, when his wife drives over his clubs in response to reading a tabloid story about his after hours dogging habit, Sam is heard to wail “Not the broomhandle… Please God not the broomhandle!”. This is almost certainly the most extreme recorded expression of love between man and broomhandle putter since Sam Torrance won the 1990 German Masters, and lacks contemporary credibility.

A Google search brought up scant information about Leonie Fox and all we can glean from her author biog is that she lives in Kent and is a former magazine journalist. While the content and stylistic sensibility of Private Members would not seem to refute either of these facts, I can’t help suspecting she’s a pseudonym. Such is the two-dimensional, male-friendly sexual world of Private Members – a world where breasts are like “exocet missiles”, legs go right up to their owner’s armpits and everyone is “fit” or lush” – my hunch is that she’s actually a fourteen year-old boy. Probably one who spends a lot of time watching sports TV. Frequently in Private Members, we find characters speaking to one another as if they are reading straight off the Grandstand autocue. “A few years ago he was one of Britain’s brightest racing talents, but his career came to a grinding halt when he crashed into a wall at the Belgian Grand Prix,” explains one of the pros of another sporting resident of St Benedict’s neighbouring village, Kirkhulme.

“It’s another well-known glamour model – Shannon Stewart,” says Keeley, the most avaricious of the book’s females, when a well-known glamour model, Shannon Stewart, appears. When they’re not talking like Ray Stubbs or the voiceover for a late night reality show, the characters from Private Members will usually converse like characters from an early 1980s sitcom. There’s certainly a lot of snobbery at British golf clubs, but I can’t quite believe that anyone outside of a repeat of George And Mildred would unironically use a phrase like “See what happens when you let the riff-raff in” in the late Noughties.

Of course, nobody actually speaks like this to one another in real-life, but sometimes, reading Private Members, I wondered if things might be better if they did. If someone actually came out and talked about the “riff-raff”, rather than making nasty pretend jokes about the riff-raff’s rubbish clubs or surreptitiously moving away from them in the men’s bar and furtively reporting their dress code violations to the committee, wouldn’t life be more straightforward? If you saw a well-known glamour model called Shannon Stewart but didn’t know who she was, wouldn’t it be better if there was someone on hand to straightforwardly fill you in on the facts, rather than to just say “Oh, look, it’s Shannon Stewart”, prompting you to pretend that you were familiar with her, leading to a myriad of potentially embarrassing misunderstandings? Wouldn’t life be less of a headache if, like seemingly all the characters in Private Members, we had no shading to our desires and wanted nothing but sex, money and the chance to regain our “Scottish Strokeplay” title? Or maybe some of us do. It’s a long time since I was fourteen, so I’m probably not the best person to ask.

I suppose this is the point of Private Members: it allows you to escape to a place where adults are ribald cardboard cut-outs, all of whom want the same things out of life – primary among these being, in fluctuating order of importance, 3) A wristwatch worth £20,000 or more, 2) some giant silicone breasts and 1) a mock Georgian mansion. That kind of escapism, perhaps slightly unwittingly, might sum up the state of mind of many modern adolescent golfers, but singing its praises might also be a way of excusing a book full of unbelievable characters and bad dialogue, whose knowledge of its central subject seems to come primarily from a BBC Sports Personality Of The Year golf highlights reel. Nonetheless, I can’t help feeling glad that Private Members exists. Just as in the Kingdom Of The Blind the one-eyed man is King, in the Kingdom Of The Golf Bonkbuster the female writer with a publishing deal is Queen, and any book that might bring more women to golf has to be incontrovertibly a good thing. One just hopes for their sake that, unlike many of the women in Private Members, their legs don’t go “right up to their armpits”. I don’t speak from firsthand experience here, but common sense suggests that kind of physical deformity is going to make a good full turn on the way back nigh on impossible.