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There are certain novelists whose skills call to mind the wonders of engineering. You don’t have to notice how a bridge holds you up in order for its span to support you, but there’s pleasure to be had in noting the tension and compression in the cables and towers. In just this way, David Nicholls’ new novel You Are Here begins with seemingly artless simplicity. “In all her youthful visions of the future, of the job she might have, the city and home she might live in, the friends and family around her, Marnie had never thought that she’d be lonely.”
Swiftly Nicholls sketches an outline — just enough information to begin to come to an understanding of who Marnie might be and for us to want to know more. From the get-go, we are on her side. The certainty that this dilemma will be solved by the book’s final page makes the tale more satisfying, not less: how is always more interesting that what, and Nicholls knows this better than most.
In recent months, the new Netflix adaptation of Nicholls’ One Day has brought many of us to the sofa, happily clutching hankies and the 15-year-old novel has gone back to the top of the bestseller charts. A new generation is discovering Emma and Dexter, their fateful love affair powered, in part, by Nicholls’ fascination with Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. (For my money, his 2008 television adaptation of that novel starring Gemma Arterton is a truly fine rendering of that subtle, painful book.) In novels such as Starter for Ten and Us, his work has revealed so-called ordinary life — and so-called ordinary love — with humanity and humour.
Marnie is 38. She has a short, bad marriage behind her, to Neil, a former co-worker both forgettable and cruel. She now works as a freelance proofreader and editor, a solitary life that gradually seals her off from friends who fall into marriages and parenthood. She listens to the radio. She scrolls her social media feed. She is both completely familiar to the reader and — almost immediately — a clear individual thanks to the close observation of Nicholls’ writing. “Sometimes, she thought, it’s easier to remain lonely than present the lonely person to the world,” she thinks. “Unless she did something, the state might become permanent, like a stain soaking into wood.”
And so — inevitably, happily — we meet Michael, desperately trying to keep a gaggle of teenagers interested in the geology of a mountain in Wales. Nicholls confronts the challenge he has set himself head-on: “Like rivers, all jokes had to begin somewhere and he sometimes wondered who had started the notion that geography teachers were dull.” Is Michael dull?
Not in the least, because we have already been charmed by his exasperated banter with these distracted students (“Any reason why the word ‘plucking’ is funny? Tell the class. No, I thought not”) but like Marnie, Michael has been disappointed, and his creator revels in his ordinariness, lovingly rendering his scruffy beard, his jumper, his passion for . . . geography. He’s in his forties; his wife Natasha has returned to live with her parents. Covid, combined with their struggle to conceive a child, strained their marriage towards separation.
The chapters of this novel are written in the third person, but alternate between Marnie and Michael’s perspectives. Michael is a walker, and plans to hike from English coast to English coast along the 190-mile route famously devised by Alfred Wainwright. Cleo, deputy head at Michael’s school and an old friend of Marnie’s, insists on tagging along for part of the journey and bullies Marnie into joining her. And so the pair meet, as destiny insists they must.
It sounds a little convoluted, but Nicholls’ sure touch allays any doubts. Marnie finds herself compelled by Michael’s endearing determination to persevere with his plan despite awful hotels, terrible food and worse weather. A friendship develops — confessional, vulnerable. Nicholls’s dialogue has the snappy informational quality of an experienced screenwriter and the understated humour of the middle-aged Brit. “How long were you together?” Michael asks Marnie of her ex. “Married nearly three years, which is more than you get for manslaughter,” she replies.
If the ending isn’t terribly surprising, it isn’t precisely what you’d expect either. And Michael and Marnie’s journey is enriched by the author’s deep feeling for landscape: a north of England where beauty comes in shocking bursts, sunlight piercing the clouds. If Nicholls has too much of a soft spot for the amusing simile (“as if presenting a documentary on the Wars of the Roses”; “as if he were his own dog” and “as if the meat had argued with the pastry” all come within a couple of pages) you forgive him, because the images make you smile, and because you’re rooting for Marnie and Michael.
Some readers might wonder whether this novel remains just a little too much in Nicholls’ safe zone; he has made himself the chronicler of the Ordinary English Love Story, the Poet of the Pedestrian — quite literally in this case, as there’s so much walking involved. Perhaps, some day, he’ll move in a new direction. But he remains a master of his particular craft. This is a novel that will make you feel terrific. Just now, don’t we all need that more than ever?
You Are Here by David Nicholls Sceptre £20, 368 pages
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