Immediately after his famous statement that “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind”, the poet John Donne observed with caustic humour that such an involvement is not “a begging of misery or a borrowing of misery, as though we are not miserable enough of ourselves but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors”.
As Nick Hornby’s novel begins, four individuals are on the roof of a tower block known with gallows humour as Toppers House. Each believes that he or she is about to commit suicide by jumping. Each is saturated with misery and loneliness. The routes by which Martin, Jess, JJ and Maureen have reached this place are very different, but the act of trying to die makes them kin in a way that has nothing to do with the normal bases of human relationships. Without liking, attraction, or a common history — sharing nothing, indeed, but their failure to commit suicide — the four come to realise that they will be moving through the foreseeable future together.
The novel is narrated by one character after another, with quick, well-handled changes of voice and viewpoint. Jess is a young, furious girl who might be the 21st-century sister of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Like him, she is traumatised by the loss of a beloved, admired elder sibling, and alienated from family and the bourgeois future that is her birthright. However, Jess is a harder case than Caulfield. Hornby skilfully describes this tormented, outrageous child of a government minister. She abuses herself and everybody else, but still falsely believes that somewhere down beyond the lights there is a safety net.
Martin Sharp, a television celebrity who has been in jail for having slept with a 15-year-old girl, is the most complex, robust and satisfying character in the novel, and also a classic unreliable narrator. Self-deceiving to a degree, he keeps almost convincing almost everybody, including himself, that he is one of the insulted and injured. Hornby makes no bones about the horribleness of Martin’s behaviour, but judgment of characters is not the point of this novel.
A Long Way Down is primarily a moral comedy, and this odd and at first sight unappealing bunch of characters confronts the reader with a moral question. Since everyone, however compromised, tormented, trapped or vile, must live out their life even after their situation has been pointed out either by others or their own perceptions, how then are they to proceed? These four characters turn away from the 15-storey drop, and so are left with two choices. They can delude themselves more effectively, or they can begin to change.
The set-up of the novel is well done. This gang of ex-suicides, with their reunion plans, wary neediness and radically awful personal circumstances, are promising from the start. The roof on which they find themselves is no metaphor but a real place, with barbed wire that has to be managed with a little stepladder and a pair of wire-cutters. Downstairs, a party attended by people called Bong, Puddle and Mental Mike is in full swing. Up on the roof awful deaths have happened, and may at any moment happen again.
Two of the four chief characters are relatively fuzzy. JJ, the failed American musician, arrives at Toppers House with a pizza delivery. Hornby has acute, interesting things to say about what music is in the lives of young men whose talent burns and then burns out, and whose fame is measured in a few perfect gigs. Without formal education, without prospects, JJ is washed up, bitter and angry. The idea is good, but the enactment lacks individuality and depth.
A similar weakness shows in the characterisation of Maureen, who is 51 and worn out by years of caring for her disabled son, Matty. Her cause of despair is clear. She had sex once, and it resulted in a lifetime of struggle. Her situation and her voice, however, never quite come alive. Maureen’s Catholicism, which is billed as central to her view of duty and suicide, remains unconvincing. Like many fictional Catholics, Maureen is an unusually frequent visitor to the confessional, yet seems to have no contact with the practicalities of the Church. It is hard to believe, for example, that Matty has never been offered a pilgrimage to Lourdes, or that nobody from St Vincent de Paul has yet popped around to Maureen’s place. With some writers this lack of authenticity wouldn’t matter much, but Hornby is usually so sharp in his comic focus on the detail of 21st-century urban life that any falling-off is a disappointment.
But this is far from being a disappointing novel. Hornby’s droll, dry, elegantly timed riffs on such things as the function of soullessness in chain cafés are a pleasure. So, too, is the fact that he is extending his fictional range. A well-loved, bestselling novelist can so easily write the same book again and again, under various disguises, and there are risks in deciding to push the boundaries. Although A Long Way Down is not an evenly successful novel, it justifies Hornby’s decision to write about that misery which we have no need to beg or borrow, and which makes such strong, strange connections between one desperate soul and the next.
A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby, Viking, £17.99; offer £14.39, call 0870 1608080
‘Captain Coffee was desperate . . .’
JESS: It was my idea that we met for a coffee regularly — either at Maureen’s or somewhere in Islington. But we couldn’t agree on where we’d meet. I wanted to go to Starbucks, because I like frapuccinos and all that, but JJ said he wasn’t into global franchises, and Martin had read in some posey magazine about a snooty little coffee bar in between Essex Road and Upper Street where they grow their own beans while you waited or something. So to keep him happy, we met up there.
Anyway, this place had just changed its name and its vibe. The snootiness hadn’t worked out, so it wasn’t snooty any more. It used to be called Tres Marias, which is the name of a dam in Brazil, but the guy who ran it thought it confused people, because what did one Mary have to do with coffee, let alone three? And he didn’t even have one Mary. So now it was called Captain Coffee, and everyone knew what it sold, but it was still empty.
We walked in, and the guy that ran it was wearing this old army uniform, and he saluted us, and said, Captain Coffee at your service. I thought he was funny, but Martin was like, Jesus Christ, and he tried to leave, but Captain Coffee wouldn’t let us, he was desperate. He told us we could have our coffee for free on our first visit. So we didn’t walk out, but the next problem was that the place was tiny. There were like three tables, and each table was six inches away from the counter, which meant that Captain Coffee was leaning on the counter listening to everything we said. And because of who we were and what had happened to us, we wanted to talk about personal things, so it was embarrassing him standing there.
Martin was like, Let’s drink up and go, and he stood up. But Captain Coffee went, What’s the matter now? So I said, The thing is, we need to have a private conversation, and he said he understood completely, and he’d go outside until we’d finished. And I said, but really, everything we say is private. And he said it didn’t matter, he’d still wait outside unless anybody else came. And that’s what he did, and that’s why we ended up going to Starbucks for our coffee meetings. It was hard to concentrate on how miserable we were, with this berk in an army uniform leaning against the window outside checking that we weren’t stealing his biscuits, or biscotties as he called them. People go on about places like Starbucks being impersonal and all that, but what if that’s what you want? I’d be lost, if JJ and people like that got their way, and there was nothing unpersonal in the world. I like to know that there are big places without windows where no one gives a shit. You need confidence to go into small shops and small restaurants and cafés. I’m happiest in the Virgin Megastore and Borders and Starbucks and Pizza Express, where no one gives a shit. My mum and dad are always going on about how soulless those places are, and I’m like, Der. That’s the point.
© Nick Hornby 2005. Edited extract from A Long Way Down
