Comic novelist asks some serious questions
You Are Here is an unusual novel, unusual for our time anyway. It is amusing and true to life. It is gentle, free from fashionable extravagance. There is no showing-off and no oddity.
The characters are recognisable people, the two principal ones being a teacher, Michael, and Marnie, a freelance copy editor. Both are in the second half of their thirties. Both are solitary, after failed marriages. Both are likeable and have friends who worry about them. Michael is clearly unhappy, Marnie less obviously so.
A friend they have in common reckons they need to snap out of their willful isolation. Michael’s takes the form of long solitary walks. Marnie confines herself to her small London flat. She is an admirably conservative copy editor. There is a very funny passage when, on a train North, she is editing what is described as an “erotic thriller”.
She is on the train because Cleo, her friend and also Michael’s, has nagged her into joining a weekend walking party crossing the North of England from the Solway to the East Coast.
Cleo’s intention is clear. They will both snap out of themselves, though she has also supplied an alternative friend for Marnie: Conrad, a South London pharmacist.
The weather is dreadful – Nicholls is very good on weather. They stop at quite nice hotels, though some are nicer than others: one may have “the ghosts of hygiene inspectors” or, indeed, rooms named after fungal infections: “I’m in Impetigo, you’ve got Ringworm”.
This is an intelligent, sympathetic, amusing and humane novel, but what is most pleasing is its ordinariness. It is happily free of extravagant or improbable characters, free also of violence and cruelty. Nicholls writes of recognisable people and his characters are all individuals rather than types.
Marriages are broken but without violence. There is pain, certainly, unhappiness, loneliness, a touch – but not more than a touch – of bitterness, a nagging unhappiness.
But at the same time, the further you read, the more you realise that, while unhappiness is in one sense a choice, it is also something from which recovery is possible.
There are second chances in life, third chances too, probably. At the same time Nicholls recognises that people who have been hurt and have chosen to withdraw to some extent from social life may have done so because that threatens them with commitment, which is a weight and demanding, and because coming back, engaging more fully in life, demands courage.
Isn’t it easier and safer to resist that temptation? Perhaps Michael may live more easily with his long solitary walks; perhaps Marnie may live more comfortably with her freelance editing, correcting authors’ grammar and punctuation. Might the solitary life always be easier than a shared one?
These are serious questions, ones with which novelists such as Jane Austen, Susan Ferrier and Anthony Trollope have always concerned themselves.
Nicholls, who is a humane as well as comic novelist, recognises this. The way you live now may be the path of least resistance, the most comfortable way of avoiding hurt and getting through life. But mayn’t it also be escapist, even cowardly, and mightn’t there be another, more satisfying way of living?
Nicholls brings his characters to the point of decision with sympathetic intelligence. He is a novelist who brings understanding to his work; also, happily, he is often very funny.