Book review: Us by David Nicholls

I’ve been looking forward to reading this; I’ve been a huge fan of David Nicholls’s work since someone lent me a copy of One Day. Nicholls seems to have carved himself a niche that, on the surface, seems a little hard to define. The best I can come up with is that he writes about ordinary people who suddenly find their lives turned inside out by an extraordinary situation. Us is no exception. We are introduced to Douglas, a biochemist married to Connie, a bohemian free-spirit whom he suspects he doesn’t deserve (he is punching slightly above his weight), and his son Albie whom he has almost no connection with. After twenty-five years of marriage, Connie announces that when Albie leaves home for university, then she’ll be leaving Douglas too.

1433134101_thumb.jpegDouglas, being a scientist, deduces that the best way to save his marriage, and salvage any kind of relationship with his son, is to use a trip across Europe as a way to heal old wounds and forge new bonds. And so the reader accompanies the three of them across the continent, along with the uneasy feeling that none of this is going end well.

As always, it is an extremely well-written book. Nicholls crafts his prose concisely and with a certain terseness that flows easily from page to page. His characters are equally well-crafted, but having read a few of his books I’m starting to get the feeling that I’ve met them before. They’re all slightly detached and very sardonic. I do like this because it gives his dialogue a flat, dry wit, but I am starting to think that I’m reading about the same people in different situations.

The road-trip itself is funny and sad and extremely vivid. You do get a sense that you’re right there with them experiencing Douglas’s frustration; he seems to live behind a sheet of glass with his wife and son on the other side. At times though, I thought the exposition into art galleries and landmarks got a little too dense, a bit like reading a travel brochure, and I found that it detracted from the main story. As we headed towards the end, I think I became a little impatient with all the tourist paths; I really wanted to know things turned out. I know how important it is not to rush the ending of a good novel, but by the same token, you can stretch things out a little too far.

But overall, I really enjoyed Us, and would recommend it as a cracking good read, though I didn’t like it as much as One Day or Starter for Ten.

I’m going to give it a very respectable seven out of ten.

Book #3 is back from the cleaners!

Six weeks of pacing around the study came to an end yesterday: the draft of my next novel came back from the editor. Well, the report came back; the actual manuscript will need a van to get it here (more on this a bit later).

First of all, I read the letter, then I read the advice on how to use the report (though I’ve used Cornerstones before), and then, after a good stiff drink, I read the report.

To say that I’m rather pleased with myself doesn’t begin to cover it.

I’m not going to bore you with the whole thing, but there are a few things that I look for in an editor’s report which will tell me whether or not I’ve hit the mark. I hit all of them, but the one I’m most proud of is ‘effortless’. I’ve hit three out of three effortless‘s so far and I’m pretty chuffed because that’s exactly what I’m aiming for: I want to make writing look easy, even though it isn’t. This was especially difficult for the current novel because, at seven hundred pages, it’s the longest piece of work I’ve attempted so far, and holding a reader’s attention over that length is no walk in the park.

Of course there are a fair number of problems that will need reworking, but the biggest problem with the draft is that from a commercial point of view it’s way too long. It’s unlikely that any agent would pick up a seven hundred page book from an author who has never been published through the traditional channels. Even more worrying is that I’m not even sure how eBook readers feel about erotic literary epics.

I did know this would be a problem, but I wanted to get the story down on paper (metaphorically speaking) before deciding what to do about it. So now, I need to take a few months away from the manuscript and mull over what to do about it. My editor suggested two possible courses of action:

  • Leave the novel structured as it is and see what happens.
  • Rewrite the book as a series of three novels  and go again.

I don’t have a preference yet, and that’s probably a good thing. Hurrying a revision means you’ll just paper over the cracks while the underlying problems remain untouched. This is my finest work to date; it deserves me at my best to make it even better.

And it reinforces my view that no book (no matter its genre or how it’s published) should go out unless it’s been looked over by an experienced editor.