Countryside chick-lit

Daisy Waugh's last novel, The New You Survival Kit, ended with PR gal Jo Smiley decamping from her chic Islington pad to the crumbling Queen Anne estate that came with her Old Etonian fiance, Charlie. This sequel hauls the happy couple back from honeymoon to find their cows laid low with foot-and-mouth and nothing in the piggy bank.

MAFF's henchmen do their stuff and Jo (now expecting twins) refits the manor as a refuge for paparazzi-pursued celebrities, aided by the oldschool ties of Charlie's dad, known simply as General. The stars flock in, but so does the meddlesome local council.

Ten Steps to Happiness is, then, a chick-lit sequel, a townie-out-of-water tale, an over-the-top celebrity satire, an under-the-table pro-gentry rant, a spin on the self-help manual and a guide to the health and safety issues one might face when setting up a small business.

Bets, it seems, have been hedged. Rather than providing an unabashed repeat of what went before or striding boldly on to pastures new, Waugh has opted to toy with at least six different tales. Telling one would be challenge enough, trying to tell half a dozen means when they're not failing to come to life, they're viciously competing for attention.

A disgraced minor royal with a penchant for stripping sits uneasily next to a teary farm worker chucking corpses on to a cattle pyre. The mad cackles of arch-baddie Maurice Morrison, New Labour's troubled Minister for Kindness, fit ill with the "desperate, wretched laughter" of morning sickness-stricken Jo. And if you're going to choose between them, as Waugh's style forces you to, the cackles drown out the social comment every time. It's not just because it's a muddle; somewhere along the line Waugh (a much better writer than she is a juggler) has lost a grip on her heroine, once a vulnerable fashion victim, now a cross, banner-waving toff.

Her grumpiness works like a cold shower on the book's lighter moments. Rural propaganda might have been entertaining were it not quite so shameless - at one point a couple of Charlie's pets proceed to the slaughterhouse: "They were his childhood companions, his link with the past. In their gentle, affectionate souls he felt that a small part of his mother and sister were living yet." The sister, by the way, was butchered a year before by a hunt saboteur. The mother was probably flayed by vegetarians.

But Waugh's snobbiest wrath is reserved for a health inspector called Sue-Marie, "a small woman, barely five feet tall, with a strong stout body and gargantuan breasts which burst forth and sideways, at right angles, from beneath each armpit". She has terrible hair, dreadful skin, a visible panty line and the gumption to poke around the manor "making notes about safety rails and disabled toilets". Though, to be fair, Waugh does later admit, "Sue-Marie, though unusually plain and bossy, was only human".

That goodwill aside, Ten Steps to Happiness must be one of the most bad-tempered comedies ever written. Step one: avoid it.