Review: Vivien Horler

You are Here, by Davied Nicholls (Sceptre/ Jonathan Ball)

After you’ve read the first two chapters you know where this novel is going.

Marnie is a divorced copy editor in her late 30s who works from her London home. She doesn’t get out much.

But she never thought, when she contemplated her life from the vantage of her teens or 20s, that she’d end up lonely.

Michael is a 40s-something high school geography teacher in York. He loves to explain things. He deals pleasantly with his pupils, and they’re about as much company as he needs. He is grieving the break-up of his long-term partnership. He doesn’t get out much.

Luckily for them – and the plot – they have a mutual friend, Cleo, who is a headmistress and Michael’s boss. She worries about him and Marnie, not with a view to getting them together, but because she feels there should be more to their lives than loneliness and disappointment.

With great difficulty she persuades them to join her and a group planning to hike part of the way across England, from the Irish  to the North seas. Michael is an accomplished hiker, but he prefers to walk alone. Marnie is not a hiker at all, but at New Year she feels something needs to change.

In the chilly spring the party meet up near Carlisle, but it is not the size expected. Cleo’s husband has bowed out, as has a woman Cleo thought would suit Michael. The weather is atrocious, and Cleo’s teenage son hates it. So does a very good-looking man Cleo thought might attract Marnie.

The teenager is so miserable Cleo agrees to drop out, as does the goodlooking man. Which leaves Marnie and Michael.

So they walk and talk, and find a mutual attraction and…

Well, the fact you’re pretty sure from the off what is going to happen doesn’t matter, because the delight of this story is in the journey – not just the beautifully described rain-drenched fells and lakes and peaks, but towards what looks like love.

Michael and Marnie talk about their work. Michael likes to explain the geographical features they’re encountering, and by this time Marnie is sufficiently fond to let him rabbit on, with only the occasional eye-roll.

She also explains her job to him (I liked this bit because my side-hustle is newspaper copy editing).

Michael wants to know the difference between a proofreader and a copy editor.

“Proofreading is ‘You misspelled instantaneously’, copy-editing is ‘Why not say instantly’?”

There’s also the business of getting adjectives in the right order. Marnie says, rightly, that this is something the native speaker doesn’t learn, they just know.

The conventional order is opinion, size, age, shape, colour. Huh? Sounds theoretical, but here’s an example: “The lovely little old round red robin.” See, you knew.

There is a wealth of wonderful and witty dialogue between the two, which becomes less light and more meaningful as they squelch their way across northern England.

And then they reach a town, near the end of the trek, where it turns out Michael has made a plan to meet his former partner, and everything goes pear-shaped.

I’m not sure I’ve read David Nicholls before, but at the beginning of this novel there are several pages of shouts about what a fine writer he is, especially when it comes to “the minutiae of love”, as a review in the Observer put it.

Have you read, or did you watch, One Day (on Netflix)? Not only did Nicholls write the novel, he was also the executive producer of the film adaptation (which I’ve seen).

The humour and clever dialogue makes this a delightful novel. I’m going to seek out more of Nicholls’s works.