“Three days of walking with strangers. It was the kind of potentially awful experience she needed”
Very little makes me laugh. Not proper laughing anyway. Only very occasionally do I actually get the giggles. Now in ‘proper’ adulthood, I’ve got so used to laughing out of politeness that I don’t think even I realise that I’m not actually laughing – I’m fake-laughing (‘eh heh heh heh heh’ smile smile) but it’s so convincing that I’ve even convinced myself.
And then something or someone or, in this case, a book, comes along and makes you laugh hard and then you remember the gift from God that real laughter is. Those other laughing times of actual, proper, can’t-stop-laughing laughter come back to your mind and you think, ‘Now hang on. This is the real thing! I think I remember this!’
Books-wise, not much has made me laugh out loud, probably because I’m prone to choosing the more serious, melancholic stuff: Virginia Woolf, Anita Brookner, William Boyd, Claire Keegan, John Boyne. However, I do remember an old girlfriend of my brother’s giving me Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary when it first came out. That was the first book to double me up. Reading that book made me realise that studying English Literature at university doesn’t preclude putting the serious stuff aside once in a while and picking up something light or frivolous for the sheer joy of being entertained. I had so much fun reading that book – it was as if I’d discovered a part of my own character I didn’t know was there. However, inclined to take myself rather too seriously, like all undergraduate aspiring intellectuals, I returned to ‘serious’ literature and remained depressed and erudite.
In a fit of spontaneous light-heartedness whilst shopping for groceries recently, I spotted David Nicholls’ latest novel, You are Here. Drawn, no less, by its front cover (never judge a book…), I stopped and picked it up for a clandestine browse – (clandestine, you understand, because I like to delude myself that I choose books in proper bookshops not from supermarket shelves). I’d enjoyed One Day and Us a while back and, wanting to take life fractionally less seriously for a bit, popped it in my shopping basket underneath a bag of apples.
The novel is set in and around the Lake District, (a much-loved annual Roques family holiday destination), with maps outlining the coast-to-coast walk that frames the plot. I recognised a number of summit names and thought the book would make a good summer read.
I haven’t laughed so much since that first encounter with Bridget Jones. Chuckling uncontrollably on the tube, I began to feel I should take myself off somewhere private to pull myself together.
Jokes are never as good in the retelling so I won’t talk about Nicholls’ brilliant, witty, accessible dialogue or exemplary blend of finely crafted sentences with everyday, relatable, humorous normalities; his ability to draw a character from so many angles that you suspect that you’ve actually met them before; his ability to keep you gripped by his narrative flow without having to resort to ‘modern’ literary devices which often leave the reader wondering who on earth is speaking, where they are and which flashback or forward we’re currently occupying. What I will say is that it is good to be made to laugh by a writer who, despite the inevitable peppering of expletives, hasn’t descended into unnecessarily smutty or derisive terrain.
In the two days it took me to read the book’s 345 pages, I was hooked, charmed, intrigued, engaged – I haven’t felt that childlike immersion in a book for quite a long time. On reaching the final paragraph I felt a real sadness, almost a tearful lostness at the ‘goodbye’ that has to be said to the characters you’ve begun to love over the course of their story.
You Are Here is a simple, but profound story of love, loss and how we communicate. A story which made me rethink a few things as every good book should. Sometimes, in our own lives, we just can’t see the view that’s right before our eyes and need the gentle nudge of another’s story to grant us a new perspective.
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