The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review

A romance so perfect that it’s utterly dull

David Nicholls, the doyen of wistful love, has written a clunker

- By Claire ALLFREE

YOU ARE HERE by David Nicholls

368pp, Sceptre, T £16.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP £20, ebook £11.99

Have we reached peak David Nicholls? His 2009 novel One Day, in which two former college lovers meet each year for 20 years on the same date, is back in the bestseller lists thanks to the recent Netflix adaptation – a hit with Gen Z, despite its being a love letter to the 1980s. So dependable is his blend of romantic nostalgia and quotidian melancholy that readers of all literary tastes eat them up. He’s a paradox: a novelist who has never won a major book prize, yet retains a virtually critic-proof common touch.

These qualities feel embedded in the DNA of his new novel, You Are Here, the premise of which is both appealingl­y straightfo­rward and fairly prepostero­us. Marnie and Michael – she a divorced copy editor from London, he a recently separated geography teacher in York – meet at the start of a coast-tocoast group walk engineered by a mutual friend. There are other people in the group, but the novel is transparen­tly Michael and Marnie’s will-they-won’t-they journey, and the short-lived presence of a potential love conflict, in the form of a dashing pharmacist called Conrad, won’t fool anyone.

One by one, the ghastly weather and absence of metropolit­an comforts send everyone else scurrying home, and soon it’s just the pair of them, with Marnie – who only planned on staying for three days – resolving each day anew to postpone by another 24 hours her train back to London. Both are ostensibly carrying a decade’s worth of damage from their respective marriages, yet there’s a cosiness to Nicholls’s writing, an air of destiny foretold.

Nicholls nods to this contrived set-up more than once. A couple of references are made to Jane Austen, and at one point Marnie thinks: “Like a Regency novel, the etiquette of walking required that she spent time in conversati­on with each of the guests.” Marnie and Michael are no Darcy and Elizabeth, but from the outset, they affectiona­tely spar with the scissoring wit of any

Austen protagonis­t. The substance of the novel, though, as the pair trudge on, enduring pub fish-andchips and soggy socks, the slowly improving weather tracking their emotional arc, is pure Nicholls. His previous novels have tended to look back wistfully at the latter decades of the 20th century, yet You Are Here is attuned to technology­mediated 21st-century loneliness. The “What a year!” photomonta­ge generated by Marnie’s phone features pictures of her NI number and lentil soup; a text-message Michael receives from his ex ends with the politely bland “hopeallswe­ll”. Both characters are, in typical Nicholls style, haunted by a parallel un-lived life.

Readers love Nicholls because he mines with exquisite intimacy the humdrum aspects of daily life, finding a low-key lyricism even in that solitary packet of feta cheese which has been opened, is back in the fridge, and must be eaten by Thursday. He’s a poet of the mundane, like Larkin without the misanthrop­y. All the same, with the contours of You Are Here establishe­d at speed, we’re left with a lot of country to walk across and a lot of banter between Michael and Marnie with which to pass the time.

Much of this novel’s comic energy emanates from the dialogue, which is theatrical­ly sparky from the outset, Michael’s ruminative humour a foil to Marnie’s zany wit. Yet such performati­ve verbal hilarity also feels like a misstep: can two strangers really fall so easily into such ceaseless yet effortless badinage? When it comes to two people falling in love, Nicholls is usually careful to offset his natural sentimenta­lity with a dash of plangency, but here we get a 10-page long discussion of favourite songs that’s much too cute for words.

You Are Here toys with the expectant way in which we read novels such as this, acknowledg­ing our desire for, say, a lavish hotel dinner to become The Moment, even when we know real life rarely works out like this – or most novels. But though a late upset nearly derails things, the novel otherwise moves along with an air of an inevitabil­ity. The difficulty for the reader, then, is that there’s barely any dramatic predicamen­t in which to invest. Before long, it all becomes dull. Nicholls’s characters are often out of their comfort zone. Here, he’s much too firmly in his.

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 ?? ?? j Larkin without the misanthrop­y: David Nicholls
j Larkin without the misanthrop­y: David Nicholls

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