If you’ve been alive for longer than a day, it will have become dispiritingly obvious that do-overs or second-go-rounds are not exactly thick on the existential ground.
Even the much-vaunted concept of closure seems maddeningly elusive much of the time, with mistakes and regrets irreversible and what-ifs purely the stuff of wishing and conjecture.
But what if, wonders Fancy Meeting You Here by Melbourne-based team Ali berg and Michelle Kalus (Book Ninja and While You Were Reading), you could go back, and what if a you were given the gift of an entire decade to get “right”, assuming of course, that it was wrong to begin with? (That’s the tricky thing with life; we may think we got something wrong but how about if that gets taken care away? Maybe it wasn’t so wrong after all, hmm?)
London-based Evie Berry is the one given this dubious gift of unexpected re-invention when a visit to a mysterious interview subject as part of her ongoing cinematic broadcast with bestie Ben Feldman, whom the thirty-year-old has known since film school, leads her to being catapulted, rather gently at night much like Big, a decade earlier all kinds of poor decisions has not been made, and she’d not allowed inertia to stop her fulfilling dreams, professional, romantic and otherwise.
Would you think this the greatest present of all time? A terrifying rip in the normalcy and ordinariness of life? Something in the middle?
“Looking back at her bed, Evie’s heart began to thud faster. Instead of her queen-size mattress with the beautiful yellow metal frame she’d paid a bomb for, she was staring at the single-bed ensemble she’d slept on a teenager. Frowning, she looked around the room. Though she still had several of the framed collectors’ movie posters displayed on the walls around her—including her favourite one of Singing in the Rain—she had left her bedroom in her parents’s home in Edgware behind a long time ago. And yet, here she was.” (P. 22)
Evie is suitably freaked out at first – honestly, who wouldn’t be?
We may carp and complain about life’s great blemishes and stains but their disappearance would no doubt have the same effect as it does on Evie who’s initially alarmed on a grand and massive scale before realising that maybe this is just what she needs.
Yes! Don’t drop out of film school to write the still-unwritten screenplay. Do pursue love with a vigour and determination that would make Cupid swoon, including getting to know the delectable novelist-cum-film star Hugo Hearst who used to frequent a cafe near where Evie lived and who is likely, no, HE IS, the man of her romantic and professional dreams?
Getting Big-ed – to be fair, while they make use of this trope, Berg and Kalus make merry original use of it such that there isn’t a derivative bone in the book’s novelistic body – turns out to be the best thing since an engineered meet-cute with Hearst at said cafe and soon Evie’s once ho-hum, regret-littered life is humming with anticipation and previously unrealised possibility.
Fancy Meeting You Here is that rare and wonderful thing – a novel that pivots on an outrageous premise and yet makes it feel deeply human, poignant and fantasy funny all at once, one of those reads that feels winningly escapist and yet much rooted in the sense we all have that given enough time and re-done moments, we too could have the life of which dreams are made of, not a regret to be seen and content spilling from each and every nanosecond.
Does it quite work out that way?
Of course not, because while we might like to think we can best life, we do not reckon with other humans not living up to fevered expectation, engineered events not staying in their envisaged lane, and our lack of prophetic ability not foreseeing that what we thought might happen isn’t going to turn out exactly as planned.
Berg and Kalus bring a level of fun to Fancy Meeting You Here that jumps beautifully from rom-com level beginnings to a new life to the giddy glee of everything you ever wanted in the palm of your clearly super-talented hand but they also remember that we’re all a little flawed and broken, the stuff of being human really, and that while we can dream big without cracks in the surface or blemishes anywhere to be seen, we never really get things right.
Which is okay; things are meant to be perfect.
But try telling to Evie who is convinced that if she wishes for it, it will happen; in some sense, that’s precisely what happens when the sort-of wisdom of her nascent thirties meets the renewed thrill of being on the cusp of her twenties but really, any reinvented time, if that were possible (and of course, here it is gloriously and not-so gloriously is) always bound to develop some re-done kinks of its own since life makes that all but inevitable.
“Hugo was still half-asleep as they walked up the stairs towards their front door, and Evie was lost in a mind-morgue of time travel and Dancing Santas, which was why they both got the fright of their lives when they heard someone says, ‘Hello,’ from right in front of their door.” (P. 237)
Propelled the grass-is-greener, rose coloured glasses nostalgia that makes her think her twenties could’ve been so much better than Evie’d planned on, Fancy Meeting You Here is a beguiling mix of coulda, shoulda, woulda with the sage realisation that maybe what you really wanted was there all along and you’d just missed it.
No, not necessarily Hearst or a finished script or anything else of Evie’s Things I Got Wrong list; rather, those things that for all her eagle-eyed forensic level obsession on the things she thought she should want – and honestly, some of them she does, just not in the form she expects them to take – she simply didn’t see.
Will she see them in time? There’s a good bet, yes, but Berg and Kalus have a compelling amount of fun getting to that point, which like life itself, doesn’t exactly square with what you think might happen.
They may taken a well-used trope and run with it a decade into the past, but they make Fancy Meeting You Here an imaginative, funny, heartfelt and thoughtful journey back that might just change the future in ways no one, not even Evie sees coming, and which might bring some acceptance too of the things you cannot change, a reminder that life is a mix of set and changeable things and knowing which is which, and what you should just accept and what you should seek to make new, is a skill none of us really master.
Is that such a bas thing? Fancy Meeting You Here argues that maybe it’s not and maybe, unexpected joyful twists and turns in life aside, we should accept that what we need is not so much a do-over as an eye-opening to what was in front of us all the time, and that while the idea of things can get done again is an exciting one on some level, and might lead to some satisfying change, that it’s not the be-all and end-all and that maybe we should look around us and re-evaluate what we have and be glad it’s been there all along.