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Moving tales of young dreams and final wishes
The latest fiction reviewed
Sweet Sorrow ***** by David Nicholls
(Hodder & Stoughton, £20)
David Nicholls’s novels have that very rare gift: relatability. His characters live lives that his millions of readers can identify with and, what’s more, they think like his readers, too.
He somehow seems to be privy to all our secret thoughts about our jobs, our loved ones, ourselves. Reading his previous novels, such as One Day and Us, I wondered sometimes if he had hacked into my computer and read the journal I keep on it. Now, with his new novel, the fellow has gone too far: he seems to have broken into my house and found the cupboard where my old teenage diaries are kept.
Sweet Sorrow is narrated by Charlie Lewis, a nondescript (by his own admission) 16 year old who has messed up his GCSES and finds himself, in the summer of 1997, wondering what he’s going to do with his life.
He falls heavily for a clever girl called Fran and so, somewhat reluctantly, joins an amateur troupe of oddballs who are putting on a production of Romeo And Juliet with Fran as the female lead.
It’s directed by Ivor, whom Charlie describes as having “the bumptious, cajoling manner we knew from kids’ TV” – proof that Nicholls has not lost his feeling for that precise choice of words that can turn a sentence into comedy gold.
We follow Charlie as he embarks on the first romance of his life while struggling with his unexciting role in the play – he plays Benvolio. Who? Exactly.
It is all respite from living at home with his depressive father. Nicholls’s depiction of the tragicomedy of the strained relationship between father and son is the great triumph of the book.
There is a memorable scene in which Charlie manages for the first time to upset his father during an argument: “For an awful moment,” he recalls, “I had a terrible, spiteful sense of power. This is me, I thought, I’ve done this, and I don’t care.” That was one of many points in the book when I found myself not just remembering but re-experiencing some of the long-forgotten emotions of my own teenage years.
The book is deliberately, almost defiantly, gentle and undramatic. Most of us will find that Charlie’s experiences do not differ all that much from our own. But Nicholls proves that, in the hands of a master storyteller, our own unremarkable experiences can be turned into something magical. The Hiding Game **** by Naomi Wood
(Picador, £14.99)
In this powerful, tense, beautifully written tale, middle-aged artist Paul Beckermann is looking back upon the 1920s of his youth. As a naive 18 year old he headed to Weimar’s trailblazing Bauhaus art school where the teaching was revolutionary and avant-garde and students were encouraged to experiment and reimagine the world, a way of working which was startling and new to suburban Paul.
He falls overwhelmingly for the luminous, mysterious Czechoslovakian Charlotte. But she is enamoured of Jeno, who is also helplessly loved by Walter Konig. It’s a heady mix of unrequited love, jealousy and creativity. Wood brilliantly captures their “golden years”, a time when everything glimmered and glittered with potential, despite the jealousies and ego jousting.
But there are dark clouds on the horizon; Hitler is on the rise with a mission to clear Germany of Jews, foreigners and artists.
It’s immediately clear to the reader that Charlotte is in grave danger but the everwatchful Paul cannot see or admit the peril she’s in. His relentless, wilful blindness seals Charlotte’s fate and his own guilt in a story that unfurls with tragic, heartbreaking consequences. Eithne Farry
The Carer **** by Deborah Moggach (Tinder Press, £16.99) Professor James Wentworth is getting more decrepit by the day. He knows it, his middle-aged children know it and his new carer Mandy knows it. As the once eminent scientist reaches the evening of his life, he needs round-the-clock care – and neither of his offspring are up for the task.
Mandy, then, seems to be a godsend, arriving in their lives just when the Wentworths need her most. With her doughy knees, tasteless home improvements and questionable views about the other villagers, Robert and Phoebe are surprised how much their normally reticent father – a man they’ve spent a lifetime desperately trying to impress – seems to like her.
Can their father, once esteemed for his towering intellect and ground-breaking work as a particle physicist, really be relishing low-brow soap operas and trips to discount shopping outlets?
But the more comfortable this cuckoo carer seems to get in the nest of their family life, the more Robert and Phoebe begin to question whether she really is the blessing she seems.
Nothing is certain in the hands of this veteran storyteller, author of Tulip Fever and
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Just as the reader begins to grow comfortable with the affable characters, Moggach delivers a humdinger of a plot twist that sends the novel spinning off on to an entirely different plane, one populated with new characters who have their own, parallel stories to tell.
This is a world full of charm, warmth and pitch-perfect humour, but it is also a world punctuated by Moggach’s blistering truths on the tangled, sorrowful threads of resentment and disappointment that bind families together.