Viking £17.99 pp257

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus famously stated that “there is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide”. The po-faced Frenchman had less to say about whether or not the question of suicide could be approached in a less-than-serious manner. In his latest novel, Nick Hornby takes up the challenge, boldly addressing this most sombre of issues with his famously deft touch.

The novel opens with a raucous set-piece in which four very different people arrive on the roof of a north London tower block on New Year’s Eve with the common purpose of ending it all. (This is less unlikely than it at first seems, since the building proves to be a well-known jumping-off point, nicknamed Toppers’ House.) After some knockabout humour in which Martin, a disgraced morning-television presenter, winds up sitting on the head of volatile rich girl Jess to keep her from leaping, the foursome strike up an alliance and decide to postpone the decision on jumping until Valentine’s Day.

What follows is an often extremely funny account of four lost souls stepping away from the precipice. On first blush, only two of them seem to have any reason for killing themselves — 51-year-old Maureen, whose entire existence is devoted to looking after her catastrophically handicapped son, and minor-celeb Martin, whose ill-advised affair with a 15-year-old girl has led to him being “cast out of the Garden of Islington” into a wasteland of divorce, tabloid infamy, jail and a gig at down-market “FeetUpTV!”, where he is forced to interview not only has-beens but also “had-beens”.

Less apparent is the despair that afflicts Jess and JJ, a failed American rock musician whose dreams of stardom have fizzled out and who works as a pizza delivery boy. It is JJ who first thinks of the four survivors as a sort of pop band, bound together by a transcendent purpose. Soon, all of them come to acknowledge the bizarre camaraderie engendered by their suicidal urge. “Even though we had nothing in common beyond that one thing,” Martin understands, “the one thing was enough to make us feel that there wasn’t anything else — not money, or class, or education, or age, or cultural interests — that was worth a damn.”

The scenes where they lean shakily on each other for support (or squabble operatically) are cunning and wise. Hornby is a master at depicting apparently futile endeavours that somehow become redemptive, such as the quartet’s attempt to set up a reading group in which they will discuss only books written by suicides. The project hits the rocks during To the Lighthouse when Jess suggests that Virginia Woolf probably “killed herself because she couldn’t make herself understood”, a glib verdict that nonetheless describes what ails each of these lonely people. There is also a trip to Tenerife that ends in drunken disaster but is the best time Maureen ever had. The novel’s action concludes with an ill- advised “intervention” session at Starbucks in which people close to each of the four confront them about their shortcomings. What results is a near riot that still manages to inject each with a dose of salvation.

Hornby’s satirical eye is characteristically sharp for much of the book, such as his description of a grief-stricken politician’s wife as “tall, expensively dressed and disfigured by a hideous smile that clearly bore no relation to anything she might be feeling, a real election night of a smile”. (Earlier, when her husband, an education minister, is criticised during a heated family argument for sending his troubled daughter to a state school, he defends himself with a factoid: “Fifty-one percent of (her) year got grade ‘C’ or above at GCSE, up 11% on the year before.”

Hornby is also very funny on tabloid journalism, showing how a rogue detail (in this case, Jess’s description of an angel she allegedly saw on the night of her near suicide as looking like Matt Damon) can move from the periphery to the centre of a story.

Despite the novel’s rich comedy, there remains an uneasiness at its core. While Hornby’s sensibility is perfectly matched to topics such as fandom, romantic entanglements and reluctant fatherhood, it proves a much less comfortable fit with the subject of suicide. When forced to choose between maintaining his comic tone and dealing with the dark side, he invariably opts for the former. You never for a moment believe that his characters are capable of snuffing themselves. A quick, jarring glimpse of an actual suicide two-thirds of the way through the story only serves to emphasise the distance between the foursome’s stated intentions and their real possibilities. They could have met while stuck in a lift without really changing (or diminishing) the novel’s virtues.

Perhaps sensing that his story does not carry the weight of his theme, Hornby has each character spend a considerable amount of time explaining themselves. This is not necessarily a problem (think of Rob’s sublime ruminations in his earlier novel, High Fidelity), but here the talk takes on an earnest quality that is the opposite of comedy, such as JJ’s “what I owned up to was this: I had wanted to kill myself not because I hated living, but because I loved it”.

One closes this book understanding that Hornby remains one of our most gifted comic writers — but also that the subject of suicide is best left to mirthless, chain-smoking French existentialists.

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