SOURCE: “Famine in Fashion,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4768, August 19, 1994, p. 20.

In the following review, Walker assesses Fielding's Cause Celeb.

Helen Fielding is a London-based freelance journalist, who has also produced documentaries for Comic Relief in the Sudan, Ethiopia and Mozambique. In Cause Celeb, her first novel, she has made use of these two sharply different experiences (the dust-jacket emphasizes this in its contrasting photographs of Ethiopian refugees and metropolitan neon signs), with a storyline that runs roughly as follows: jolly, decent, good-looking London girl saves starving refugees in less than a month. The juxtaposition of poverty in Africa with the fat-cat affluence of London's media celebrities is not a subtle narrative device, and Fielding rams the contrast home. The celebs are ruthlessly lampooned (though the jokes are perhaps more amusing to the insiders for whose benefit they are made) while the Africans, especially Muhammad, the refugee poet...