Book review: You Are Here by David Nicholls

(courtesy Hachette Australia)

We’re all used to the rom-com idea of love being swift, heavily meet-cutey and complicated just enough to make the reaching of the romantic finish line feel like an earned thing.

But the truth is, love isn’t ever really that straightforward, and while we might fall for someone reasonably quickly in a love-at-first sight slow motion kind of way, the building of any sort of relationship with them takes time and effort and involves more than a few missteps and detours into the many demons that clog our addled souls.

So, while love of the rom-com kind is a joyously escapist delight, it can also feel like a lot of pressure and a lot to live up to which is why the novels of David Nicholls are so refreshingly freeing.

His latest, You Are Here, continues his wonderful track record of serving up love as a grand and epic and soul-satisfying thing while reassuring those of us who feel intimidated by the largely immaculately served up love of swoon-worthy fiction that it’s tough to open yourself up to someone, to lower those existential gates and have someone not only know you but KNOW YOU very, very well.

Far from diluting the Cupidian thrust and impact of romantic fiction, You Are Here, and its predecessors such as the brilliantly and recently adapted One Day, actually elevate and enhance because here is a love story grand and all-consuming that stumbles and trips and falls even as it suggests, rather delightfully, the coming together of two people who need each other and will be quite lovely together.

And he leant towards her and was surprised when she leant in, her head suddenly on his shoulder. The air around her: vinegar and fat, gin and gravy granules and cheap shower gel.

‘You smell very nice,’ he [Michael] said [to Marnie], meaning it.

The title of the novel is drawn from those markers you see on maps all the time that tell you precisely where you are, providing of course you know where you are in the first place.

This allusion works for the novel’s two protagonists Marnie and Michael who, while they may know where they are on the topography of the route they are walking from the west to east of northern England, starting in Cumbria, aren’t as sure of where their lives are or are going after some quite turbulent years of emotional dislocation.

Marnie, for someone who decides at long last to take a train north from London at the behest of her close friend Cleo, is a profoundly stuck individual, a woman still smarting from the end of her marriage to the hateful Neil, who values her independence so much that she’s ended up spending all her time, working and living, if you can call her small “l” life that, in her flat.

As her friends have married and her interests have dissipated her life has shrunk and she’s lost in the maze of the nothingness that has consumed her life; but where does she go next? She’s not sure, and to be honest, she seems, discomfort and discontentment enough, to accept that she might never have the answer, despite Cleo’s constantly loving prodding.

Michael, on the other hand, is always out and about but, and it’s a crucial but, it’s always alone as he hikes great swathes of the countryside, trying to work off the end of a marriage to the love of his life, Natasha, a relationship that foundered on their inability to have children and whose end has left Michael feeling so adrift he just keeps walking in the hopes of finding something, anything.

These two quite lonely and lost people, both of whom know Cleo well, end up on a grand hiking journey through fog and rain and sleet and honestly just about every kind of weather going, and while they aren’t the two that Cleo has in mind to pair up – Marnie is supposed to match with self-involved pharmacist Conrad while Michael and Tessa, both “outdoorsy”, are supposed to fall, hiking boots and all for each other – they strike up an unexpected friendship.

One that, it must be noted, is almost instantly and rigorously and endlessly tested as inveterate hiker Michael leads Marnie and other amateur walkers on a less-than-merry walk up and down dale and mountain and almost cliff, something he loves but which makes Marnie wonder if he may not be just a little bit crackers.

But for all that, they strike up a connection, and when the others drop off and head back to the warmth and comfort of their day-to-day lives, Marnie sticks around for reasons she can’t quite fathom, other than she likes Michael, and the two of them set off on a journey, not simply to the east coast of England but into another unexpected chapter of their lives.

It was from Michael, the first she’d received, an abstract vertical image, horizontal bands of industrial grey and black. She clicked on it so that it filled the screen and stared at the monolith, waiting for some further explanation. Time passed.

Nothing seemed to come. She ought to go to bed now.

Marnie waited.

But here’s the thing – if you’re expecting things to go completely smoothly, hiking mishaps aside, because that’s how rom-coms go, then You Are Here is set to upend those cosy certainties.

Not in some brutishly, love-is-crap kind of way because fundamentally Nicholls believes in the transformative power of love even if he’s also happy to admit how challenging and hard it can be, but in a way that makes us mere mortals realise that you can fall powerfully and hopelessly in love without having all the answers close to hand.

In fact, neither Marnie and Michael, who twig reasonably quickly that something wholly unexpected and wondrously good might be embryonically to hand, feel like they have any answers at all, and while Marnie seems to get her act together a little faster than Michael, neither of them leap into the fray quite as quickly as is needed to realise the true potential of one chance meeting on a hiking tour of the British landscape, and in certain ways, their souls.

But that’s the fun and the joy and sadness of it all; that love can come along and delight and surprise you and you still don’t have clue one what to do with it.

That’s not the end of the story of course because You Are Here and Nicholls are all about love found, just not easily, but it’s a lot of it and it takes so much pressure of us all because finally someone has said you will find love and it will be glorious but it will also be hard and that’s okay and you will find your way through it all to someone so good it will make all the struggle well and truly worth the while.

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