At Merton Grange disco in the Nineties the school bell tolls for Charlie Lewis.
He has just flunked his GCSEs, his parents have separated and the promise of a summer interspersed by “binge camping” (tinned lagers in tents) and “raids on London to prowl Oxford Street” (shopping?) with his classmates yawns before him.
“I longed for change, and something to happen and falling in love seemed more accessible than, say, solving a murder,” he says. So — obviously — he falls for Fran Fisher, a posh girl starring in a local production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, joining their amateur theatre group. As you do.
Never does a Nicholls will-they-won’t-they romp go unrequitedly into that good night. The author of One Day and Starter for Ten — which I adored — has a rarefied talent for teasing fondness from sore spots most would rather forget, finding the bruises a reader has tended and gently prodding them.
Here, it’s the syrupy alchemy of first love. “I had a corny idea that I might draw her as soon as I got home — a few lines, a gesture, the way she tugged at the back of her denim skirt or stored her fringe behind her ear.” There is magic in the air, yes. But you begin to wonder whether that murder might have been a good idea, just to spice things up.
For Charlie Lewis is a reluctant, curiously bland narrator, all the more frustrating given that we are stuck, in the first person, inside his head throughout. He doesn’t want to be at his school disco — a crescendo of strobe lighting, excruciating fumbles and vomit at five to four in the afternoon — but then neither do we. “As a student, my distinctive feature was a lack of distinction,” he says at the beginning, an irksome tautophrase going nowhere. We all have our thoughts of self-ennui, but being saddled with some else’s starts to drag. Are we to fill Charlie’s blanks? He certainly feels like an empty vessel, a faded Go Between left in the sun too long.
Worse, there’s a moment when, as Fran talks quite alarmingly about a rape, he remains unresponsive. We aestivate in the early summer with Charlie, running Shakespearian lines begrudgingly, a drain on emotional labour.
The sweltering inertia is relieved by brushfires of Nicholls’ crackling dialogue, sweeping up the readers and bearing them aloft on an updraft. From here we can survey the landscape — the job at the petrol station from where Charlie steals scratch cards, the miserable Tennyson council estate, and the depressed father anchored to Charlie’s sofa. We know there will be a parting. There is sweet sorrow in this deadbeat suburb — one memory of his father tugs achingly towards the end of the novel. But the plot lumbers — the furthest reaches of the map never feel explored.
Nostalgia is a place we shouldn’t linger in, Nicholls seems to say, and yet we tarry in still pools of it. The mundane doesn’t quite transmute. You wonder — was there much to tell?
Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls (Hodder, £20)
