Call it Nick Hornby's greatest hits. Just like any great artist who has a back catalogue from which to draw, the popular British novelist has taken his most successful elements and packaged them up in a palatable digest. Swift, overly clever dialogue? Check. Writing in voices outside of the author's experience? Check. Musical and literary references just bordering on obscure but familiar enough to make the hipsters feel hip? Check again.
Characters you don't really like?
Well, that's a Hornby trademark, too. High Fidelity, mining the entire history of music, is still one of the best rock and roll novels ever written but its narrator, Rob Fleming is always going to be a bit of a prat. Will Lightman from About A Boy is a bit of a bastard, too, come to think of it.
That said, happy-go-lucky blokes don't make for good drama or good comedy, which are traditionally blended together in Hornby's London tales. Even if the four protagonists of his latest, A Long Way Down, don't go any further in the likeability department, at least they have a hell of a set up.
Characters you don't really like?
Well, that's a Hornby trademark, too. High Fidelity, mining the entire history of music, is still one of the best rock and roll novels ever written but its narrator, Rob Fleming is always going to be a bit of a prat. Will Lightman from About A Boy is a bit of a bastard, too, come to think of it.
That said, happy-go-lucky blokes don't make for good drama or good comedy, which are traditionally blended together in Hornby's London tales. Even if the four protagonists of his latest, A Long Way Down, don't go any further in the likeability department, at least they have a hell of a set up.
Four strangers meet up just at the cusp of midnight on New Year's Eve at the top of Topper's House, a 15-story apartment complex in North London just tall enough to end it all. They all have their reasons, some more unlikely than others. Perhaps most remarkable in an appalling way is Martin, a host for morning television who was not only jailed but tormented by the tabloids over his sexual escapade with a 15-year-old. Maureen is a desperately sad middle-aged mother of a severely disabled adult son. Jess is the cracked daughter of a government official, distraught over a breakup with her loser boyfriend. Finally, there's JJ. JJ is American, delivers pizza for a living but he reads books, dude.
On the bright side, Hornby's really stretching his voice here. I'm sure his desire to experiment with different voices started with How To Be Good, which related the caustically funny story of Katie Carr and her husband's unlikely spiritual enlightenment, but he's kicked into high gear here. A Long Way Down is told simultaneously by all four characters - in their own voice - which means that Hornby has to jump from the psyche of a middle-aged woman to an American rock n' roll guy to a punked-out British daughter to an arrogant, ruined celebrity while still moving the story along. It's not a bad trick and with the addition of Hornby's usual true-to-life dialogue, it makes the story more compelling than it otherwise might have been.
It's dangerously inventive with the very real risk of either setting up characters to fail in the end or leaving the reader with an unsatisfying ending but it turns out that Hornby knows where we're going. Of course, it takes this band of beautiful losers an hour just to get off of Topper's House but after a briefly strange interlude to Shoreditch for the quartet to chase down Jess' beleaguered boyfriend, they make a pact to do no harm for six weeks.
In a very funny twist that's sadly accurate to life in London, the press gets wind of the whole mess and suddenly they're all faced with headlines like "Martin Sharp and Junior Minister's Daughter In Suicide Pact." Now they're faced not only with their own morbid midnight thoughts but a shouting mob of invasive journalists and photographers. Hiding out in Starbuck's, they form a book club in which they vow to only read writers that have killed themselves. They manage to get it together long enough to take an ill-conceived trip to the Canary Islands that ends in drunken disaster. They also finally get to see someone take the long way down from Topper's House.
In a very funny twist that's sadly accurate to life in London, the press gets wind of the whole mess and suddenly they're all faced with headlines like "Martin Sharp and Junior Minister's Daughter In Suicide Pact." Now they're faced not only with their own morbid midnight thoughts but a shouting mob of invasive journalists and photographers. Hiding out in Starbuck's, they form a book club in which they vow to only read writers that have killed themselves. They manage to get it together long enough to take an ill-conceived trip to the Canary Islands that ends in drunken disaster. They also finally get to see someone take the long way down from Topper's House.
