A bond stronger than marriage

Elena Seymenliyska admires a rare novel about male friendship

It is 1993 when the faithful couple of this story meet in a youth hostel in San Diego. Both English, both graduates, both in their early 20s, they are homogenous only to the casual American bystander. To those versed in the nuances of the English class system, they come from different worlds. Also, they are both men. While Neil tries to chat up a pretty girl in a sarong, it is Adam, sitting in a corner with a magazine, whom he finds distracting. Adam has the “shaggy dirty-blond hair in the low-rent Romantic poet style that, Neil knew, was fashionable among a certain breed of public schoolboy”. Neil, meanwhile, is his polar opposite: “His features suited the half-light: wideset, almost-black eyes, long, feminine eyelashes, lipstick pink lips that sometimes appeared theatrical against his luminous skin.” They have both left London to bum around California for the summer. Adam, freshly graduated in history from Durham, was due to travel with his girlfriend until she dumped him. Neil (economics, Sheffield), recently sacked from his job as a soap salesman, hopes the trip will inspire his next move. There is none of the usual gladiatorial menace in how these men appraise each other. Instead, Adam simply smiles, and Neil smiles back. There follows your basic modern courtship ritual: drinks, confidences, the “tipsy communion” of karaoke. When Adam talks to other men, Neil feels jealous. After a midnight swim, Adam propositions Neil – why not continue north along the coast together? AD Miller’s second novel – his first, Snowdrops (2011) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize – is that very rare thing: a novel about male friendship. While Neil and Adam’s relationship begins with the familiar scaffolding of a love story, what evolves is something much more unusual: a bond stronger than marriage. This bond is forged on that fateful road trip. Adam and Neil join a group camping in Yosemite, where they pose for the photo that will stay with them in the decades to come, on corkboards in rented flats and as a screensaver in boring desk jobs: the two young men in front of the two giant, fused sequoias known as the Faithful Couple: “They had been competing for space and sunlight for ever… yet depended on each other’s succour to survive. They only existed together, in their rivalrous embrace.” Adam and Neil’s friendship is likewise based on constant competition. Each sees the other as an archetype, and so there is symbolism in even their most inane sparring. Such as over Rose, a fellow camper, on vacation from Colorado with her dad. Adam is the first to try it on, while Neil watches, resentful of his friend’s entitled confidence. In the end, it is Neil who succeeds, with more subtle and sustained advances. It is an early example of the two men’s distinct approaches to life, and work, and love – and a precursor of the very different outcomes that await them in all those arenas. Adam’s blithe presumption of happiness, in the manner of his pink-trousered father and beautiful mother, can go only one way. Meanwhile, Neil’s low expectations, in the wake of his dead mother and decrepit family business, can only be exceeded. Miller follows the two men from 1993 to 2011, portraying their relationships, jobs and house moves with an easy, accomplished flair alongside banking’s boom-and-bust years, the pressures of the London property market and the growth of mobile phones, email and the internet. In addition to the pleasure of introduction to the uncharted world of male friendship there is the pleasure of recognition, of “London at the end of history: neophile, frivolous, renovated in splotches, like the make-up on a careless old woman”. The book The Faithful Couple most brings to mind is the bestselling One Day by David Nicholls, another modern love story with a strong chronological backbone. And, like One Day, Miller’s novel suffers in the final furlong, racing towards a conclusion that lacks the drama of its beginning. But Miller has the edge on Nichols as a writer, and is skilled at the economical turn of phrase. Friendship, he writes, is “a luxury in any utilitarian calculus” – “no money, no sex; no tangible pay-off of any kind”. Except for readers of The Faithful Couple, who reap dividends.