Books - Sweet Sorrow by David Nichols

I suppose it is unsurprising that a book with the title Sweet Sorrow left me feeling rather sad. Not that this novel is gritty or brutal or involves the death of anyone or anything, except dreams and illusions. The problem is that the book's central message is not far off that which pervaded the novel Nichols gave us before this one, Us, a book that I found so miserable I couldn't even bring myself to write about it here; indeed, for the first time in my life I actually threw away my copy of a novel, because I didn't want to coexist in the same house with such an irritating work.

The premise of Us seemed to me to be that there are in humankind two species: the wild, exciting, attractive, arty types, which include the main character's wife and child; and the dull plodders, into which group the narrator falls. This latter group is full of people who are practical, reliable, good at things like engineering and very nice. Somehow neither the narrator nor his wife ever question the idea that, because those in the second group aren't witty or charismatic or tremendously receptive to various forms of art, they deserve the contempt meted out to them by those who are all those things.

What the narrator finally learns to accept is that he ought never to have dared to expect loyalty or love from his wife, because she is, by dint of her wackiness and her understanding of and attraction to creativity and the arts, too good for him.  The dull should know their place and not expect the revered cool ones to interrupt their reckless, thoughtless way through life - let alone remind them that the smooth order that allows them such irresponsible freedom is the creation (a useful harnessing of creativity, this) of the people that they spurn as boring.

Know your place seems to be the message of Sweet Sorrow too, although in this outing one's place seems more to be dictated by class and family circumstances, money and education, than by temperament - and the protagonist is wise enough to recognise his status before plunging into a doomed marriage, rather than too late.

Set (appropriately, given that her marriage was the greatest false fairytale of the twentieth century and the novel is all about not believing in fairytales) in the summer that Diana, Princess of Wales died, the story is told by Charlie, (the royal marriage analogy cannot stretch to cover this coincidence, I don't think) a neglected schoolboy whose mother has abandoned him, taking his sister to her new marriage,  but leaving him - "Charlie, I need you to stay with your dad" - to deal with a father whose business has failed and who has descended into depression. By chance, Charlie gets swept into an am-dram production of Romeo and Juliet. He falls for the play's Juliet and their real life romance runs in semi-parallel with the story of the lovers in the play - only semi- since the parallel is scarcely more than the fact that they are in love and Romeo and Juliet are too. Anyway, having up until then been cloth-eared to the poetry of Shakespeare, Charlie begins to faintly understand the beauty of the play's language. For a brief while, his life transcends the banal and rises to a poetic plane.

But soon the reader discovers that such joy, such transcendence, is not really for the likes of the world's Charlies, oh no, no, no. The object of his affections ends up at Oxford and ultimately - over a decade later - is seen disappearing into the distance with a Cambridge professor. This, it seems, is right and good - and glorious. Why Oxbridge is quite so reverenced I've never understood, but status it definitely has - and status is something Charlie will never have, it seems. Therefore, he must learn to accept less glittering prizes and be grateful for Niamh, a woman who the reader is introduced to in the context of weddings, allowing her to demonstrate an understanding of the two different destinies available and, within those, exactly where she and Charlie fit. Our first glimpse of her is at an extravaganza of a wedding, involving the bride arriving at a gallop along a beach, riding a white stallion; later, when she and Charlie are planning their own wedding she tells him, "When I look in your eyes and think of what you mean to me, I just think 'registry office'".

This is all probably extremely sensible, but in a book that is fairly shallow and meant to be entertaining above all else, it is somehow disappointing to end up learning only that romance doesn't usually work out and life is quite humdrum and you can be happy provided you don't expect dreams to become true. Nichols is not writing Middlemarch, after all, but escapism, and escapism is supposed to be about cheering you up with illusions, not reminding you that you're fairly dull and life is fairly dull and that's just how it is. I suppose one could argue that Nichols is being hugely original because he is subverting escapism - and to that I would only reply that subversion is often quite annoying.

But I am also being far too negative. There is some wonderfully entertaining writing in Sweet Sorrow, especially the opening scene, and a lot that is amusing, including the wry comments about the way young men interact:

"Reading in front of my mates would have been like taking up the flute or country dancing"

"I sometimes found myself trying to imagine a world in which friendship was expressed in some other way than belching in each other’s faces."

While I was infuriated by the selfishness of Charlie's mother, I did laugh at this line about her attempts to galvanise her son into working for exams:

"As an educator, Mum's great gift was her ability to instil a mutual sense of panic and futility."

In addition, although melancholy is not something I demand or desire from escapism, Nichols is very good at conjuring a terrible kind of British suburban melancholy:

"Boredom was our natural state but loneliness was taboo and so I strained for the air of a loner, a maverick, unknowable and self-contained, riding with no hands. But a great effort is required not to appear lonely when you are alone, happy when you’re not. It’s like holding out a chair at arm’s length, and when I could no longer maintain the illusion of ease, I’d cycle out of town"

In the end though the Nichols-ian insistence on the whole "I'm so humble, she's so gorgeous" stance became not only dispiriting but downright annoying. Here for instance is Charlie at a dance with his Juliet (Fran): while she is uninhibited and alive, he remains stuck in a crowded train carriage, trying not to disturb anyone, and the implication is the very boomer one that inhibition is dreary, while wild grinning and flinging oneself about is to be revered, even though in most situations - post office, bank, out at the shops - I would prefer to deal with someone inhibited than someone "letting it all hang out";

"I took my stance – feet planted, elbows tight in, hands pumping alternately in a milking motion, the kind of dance that would disturb no one in a crowded train carriage, while Fran went wild, grinning madly, her arms above her head, her hands dug into her own hair so that I could see the dark stubble in her armpits, and she caught my eye and laughed with her mouth wide, put her hands on my shoulder and said something."

I'm not suggesting that Nichols is wrong: I recognise that few of us will have lives that achieve the romantic resonance of Romeo and Juliet. Yet, however wise and true the underlying message of the story may be, there is something rather miserable about the tale of someone getting a taste of true joy and then learning to adjust their expectations to something less thrilling. Charlie has a brief moment of sweetness and then it is dashed away and that is the story. From which arises only one really interesting question - would he have been happier if he had never known that little patch of glorious pleasure, or, to trump Shakespeare's "sweet sorrow" cliche with one from Tennyson, is it "better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all"?

But this is entertainment, even if it is in a distinctly minor key. Therefore such complex questions are glided over. It seems that, if Charlie was afraid of being seen reading in front of his friends, Nichols is even more afraid of being seen to be writing seriously in front of us all. The result is, at least for this reader, a novel that strikes discordant tones.

Which does not detract from the fact that in One Day Nichols wrote a masterpiece of escapist entertainment. I suppose he keeps churning books out because he needs the money but if I were him, I'd follow the path that Liza Minelli should have taken after her wonderful performance in Cabaret and retire while the going is good.