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Review
But if the self-deprecating, brutally honest voice makes you laugh, it would be a mistake to say that Hornby writes for pure comedic value, or that his purpose is insubstantial. Each of his four novels has been a darkly humourous musing on depression in its various guises. A Long Way Down, a farcical black comedy, marks a natural progression along this trajectory, opening with the suicidal intentions of the book's four characters as they meet on the roof of a London tower block popular with citizens looking for a final way out.
Toppers' House is such an infamous spot, in fact, that the rooftop is encircled by a spiky-topped wire fence. One of the four, a sardonic, defrocked talk-show host, is nevertheless enterprising enough to bring wire cutters and a stepladder. Tapping on his shoulder to inquire about the loan of the ladder is Maureen, a middle-aged woman who has spent her entire adult life caring for her severely handicapped son and has planned her death months in advance. As the two sort out the arrangement, sixteen-year-old Jess, the foul-mouthed, unstable daughter of a Labour minister, charges at them, hollering her intention to beat both of them to the punch. With the addition of JJ, a struggling pizza-delivering American musician who just lost his band and his girl, the set is complete.
Suicide, it seems, is best accomplished in solitude, and all four lose their nerve because others are present. They agree instead to try to help young Jess, whose main trouble is romantic, and after eating the pizza JJ has provided, they descend the steps of Toppers' House to find the boy in question.
At a certain point the plot teeters, as if on the edge of a rooftop, threatening to topple toward certain doom. The four characters have decided not to jump; now what? Other characters who come in contact with them question this improbable coalition of the Toppers' House Four as if Hornby is trying to work it out himself. The story hobbles along briefly and then breaks into a full run, veering sharply into farce, as this unlikely crew grapple with Life After Topper's House. They become a post-suicidal posse, and find themselves in a variety of bizarre situations involving a media interview about their (faked) angel sighting, a vacation in Tenerife, a Topper's House reunion in situ on February 14, and a book club that reads only suicidal authors. Their regular gatherings at Starbucks culminate in an American-style "intervention", complete with former lovers, parents, and friends. The potential here for black humour is enormous, and Hornby doesn't disappoint.
Hornby has said that his books begin with situations: a guy invents a child to meet single women (About a Boy), a married man gives ú80 to a homeless person (How to be Good). In A Long Way Down, the meeting of potential suicides at a popular offing location becomes a means for bringing together four characters who would, ordinarily, never have occasion to meet. The creative advantage of this situation is the fact that the usual social rules don't apply; each has already decided to opt out in the most explicit way. But how long will it be before they coalesce and produce a new social order? In Hornby's imagined world, even the foul-mouthed teenager is apologizing to the middle-aged woman for her language within a few days, and here Hornby's vision of unregulated humanity is diametrically opposed to that of William Golding (in Lord of the Flies). A Long Way Down suggests that when left to their own devices outside the usual social norms, people will behave decently and help one another survive.
As the characters grudgingly retreat from the brink and its purgative allure, the heroism of daily living emerges as a thematic thread. JJ wryly remarks that Maureen is taking "the long way down" when she descends the staircase again on Valentines Day, and she observes that "there are other ways of dying, without killing yourself." If A Long Way Down is aphoristic, it's only so in a teasing way, as though Hornby wants to poke fun at the idea that truth should be revealed in pithy narrative.In his world, humour and pain coexist easily and necessarily.
Hornby has done well for himself with the intimate, first-person reflections of the twenty- or thirty-something male (the voice in High Fidelity is particularly well sustained and truthful), but his female characters in this book are less convincing. Jess's mature and perceptive observations are implausible at times; in comparison with Miriam Toews's Nomi (from A Complicated Kindness), whose youthful, profane voice rings with the wisdom of deep sorrow, Jess is flighty, less mature, and her musings don't ring true. Maureen's acceptance of her sad lot in life is also puzzling. She is positioned as the stable centre of the group who never erupts, although she has plenty of reasons for doing just that.
A Long Way Down has a filmic quality, which isn't surprising considering that screenwriting was Hornby's original career aspiration. The plot is largely driven by snappy dialogue; reading without imagining it on-screen is difficult. (Three of his books have been adapted to film; Johnny Depp reportedly bought the film rights to this novel before it was even published.) A Long Way Down is Breakfast Club meets Weekend at Bernie's with a British accent, a delicious, darkly humourous romp and an enjoyable read. It isn't as technically finessed as High Fidelity, but as long as Hornby writes the screenplay, all should go well.
Christine Fischer Guy (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
Book Description
In his fourth novel, New York Times-bestselling author Nick Hornby mines the hearts and psyches of four lost souls who connect just when they've reached the end of the line.
Meet Martin, JJ, Jess, and Maureen. Four people who come together on New Year's Eve: a former TV talk show host, a musician, a teenage girl, and a mother. Three are British, one is American. They encounter one another on the roof of Topper's House, a London destination famous as the last stop for those ready to end their lives.
In four distinct and riveting first-person voices, Nick Hornby tells a story of four individuals confronting the limits of choice, circumstance, and their own mortality. This is a tale of connections made and missed, punishing regrets, and the grace of second chances.
Intense, hilarious, provocative, and moving, A Long Way Down is a novel about suicide that is, surprisingly, full of life.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
MARTIN.
Can I explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower block? Of course I can explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower block. I'm not a bloody idiot. I can explain it because it wasn't inexplicable: it was a logical decision, the product of proper thought. It wasn't even very serious thought, either. I don't mean it was whimsical - I just meant that it wasn't terribly complicated, or agonised. Put it this way: say you were, I don't know, an assistant bank manager, in Guildford. And you'd been thinking of emigrating, and then you were offered the job of managing a bank in Sydney. Well, even though it's a pretty straightforward decision, you'd still have to think for a bit, wouldn't you? You'd at least have to work out whether you could bear to move, whether you could leave your friends and colleagues behind, whether you could uproot your wife and kids. You might sit down with a bit of paper and draw up a list of pros and cons. You know:
CONS - Aged parents, friends, golf club.
PROS - more money, better quality of life (house with pool, barbecue etc), sea, sunshine, no left-wing councils banning Baa-Baa Black Sheep, no EEC directives banning British sausages etc. It's no contest, is it? The golf club! Give me a break. Obviously your aged parents give you pause for thought, but that's all it is - a pause, and a brief one, too. You'd be on the phone to the travel agents within ten minutes.
Well, that was me. There simply weren't enough regrets, and lots and lots of reasons to jump. The only things in my 'cons' list were the kids, but I couldn't imagine Cindy letting me see them again anyway. I haven't got any aged parents, and I don't play golf. Suicide was my Sydney. And I say that with no offence to the good people of Sydney intended.
MAUREEN
I told him I was going to a New Year's Eve party. I told him in October. I don't know whether people send out invitations to New Year's Eve parties in October or not. Probably not. (How would I know? I haven't been to one since 1984. June and Brian across the road had one, just before they moved. And even then I only nipped in for an hour or so, after he'd gone to sleep.) But I couldn't wait any longer. I'd been thinking about it since May or June, and I was itching to tell him. Stupid, really. He doesn't understand, I'm sure he doesn't. They tell me to keep talking to him, but you can see that nothing goes in. And what a thing to be itching about anyway! But it goes to show what I had to look forward to, doesn't it?
The moment I told him, I wanted to go straight to confession. Well, I'd lied, hadn't I? I'd lied to my own son. Oh, it was only a tiny, silly lie: I'd told him months in advance that I was going to a party, a party I'd made up. I'd made it up properly, too. I told him whose party it was, and why I'd been invited, and why I wanted to go, and who else would be there. (It was Bridgid's party, Bridgid from the Church. And I'd been invited because her sister was coming over from Cork, and her sister had asked after me in a couple of letters. And I wanted to go because Bridgid's sister had taken her mother-in-law to Lourdes, and I wanted to find out all about it, with a view to taking Matty one day.) But confession wasn't possible, because I knew I would have to repeat the sin, the lie, over and over as the year came to an end. Not only to Matty, but to the people at the nursing home, and....Well, there isn't anyone else, really. Maybe someone at the Church, or someone in a shop. It's almost comical, when you think about it. If you spend day and night looking after a sick child, there's very little room for sin, and I hadn't done anything worth confessing for donkey's years. And I went from that to sinning so terribly that I couldn't even talk to the priest, because I was going to go on sinning and sinning until the day I died, when I would commit the biggest sin of all. (And why is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you're told that you'll be going to this marvellous place when you pass on. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit quicker is something that stops you getting there at all. Oh, I can see that it's a kind of queue-jumping. But if someone jumps the queue at the Post Office, people tut. Or sometimes they say, 'Excuse me, I was here first.' They don't say, 'You will be consumed by hellfire for all eternity.' That would be a bit strong.) It didn't stop me from going to the Church, or from taking Mass. But I only kept going because people would think there was something wrong if I stopped.
As we got closer and closer to the date, I kept passing on little tidbits of information that I told him I'd picked up. Every Sunday I pretended as though I'd learned something new, because Sundays were when I saw Bridgid. "Bridgid says there'll be dancing." "Bridgid's worried that not everyone likes wine and beer, so she'll be providing spirits." "Bridgid doesn't know how many people will have eaten already." If Matty had been able to understand anything, he'd have decided that this Bridgid woman was a lunatic, worrying like that about a little get-together. I blushed every time I saw her at the Church. And of course I wanted to know what she actually was doing on New Year's Eve, but I never asked. If she was planning to have a party, she might've felt that she had to invite me.
I'm ashamed, thinking back. Not about the lies - I'm used to lying now. No, I'm ashamed of how pathetic it all was. One Sunday I found myself telling Matty about where Bridgid was going to buy the ham for the sandwiches. But it was on my mind, New Year's Eve, of course it was, and it was a way of talking about it, without actually saying anything. And I suppose I came to believe in the party a little bit myself, in the way that you come to believe the story in a book. Every now and again I imagined what I'd wear, how much I'd drink, what time I'd leave. Whether I'd come home in a taxi. That sort of thing. In the end it was as if I'd actually been. Even in my imagination, though, I couldn't see myself talking to anyone at the party. I was always quite happy to leave it.
JESS
I was at a party downstairs in the squat. It was a shit party, full of all these ancient crusties sitting on the floor drinking cider and smoking huge spliffs and listening to weirdo space-out reggae. At midnight, one of them clapped sarcastically, and a couple of others laughed, and that was it - Happy New Year to you too. You could have turned up to that party as the happiest person in London, and you'd still have wanted up to jump off the roof by five past twelve. And I wasn't the happiest person in London anyway. Obviously.
I only went because someone at college told me Chas would be there, but he wasn't. I tried his mobile for the one zillionth time, but it wasn't on. When we first split up, he called me a stalker, but that's like an emotive word, 'stalker', isn't it? I don't think you can call it stalking when it's just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door. And I only turned up at his work twice. Three times, if you count his Christmas party, which I don't, because he said he was going to take me to that anyway. Stalking is when you follow them to the shops and on holiday and all that, isn't it? Well, I never went near any shops. And anyway I didn't think it was stalking when someone owed you an explanation. Being owed an explanation is like being owed money, and not just a fiver, either. Five or six hundred quid minimum, more like. If you were owed five or six hundred quid minimum and the person who owed it to you was avoiding you, then you're bound to knock on his door late at night, when you know he's going to be in. People get serious about that sort of money. They call in debt collectors, and break people's legs, but I never went that far. I showed some restraint.
So even though I could see straight away that he wasn't at this party, I stayed for a while. Where else was I going to go? I was feeling sorry for myself. How can you be eighteen and not have anywhere to go on New Year's Eve, apart from some shit party in some shit squat where you don't know anybody? Well, I managed it. I seem to manage it every year. I make friends easily enough, but then I piss them off, I know that much, even if I'm not sure why or how. And so people and parties disappear.
I pissed Jen off, I'm sure of that. She disappeared, like everyone else.
MARTIN
I'd spent the previous couple of months looking up suicide inquests on the Internet, just out of curiosity. And nearly every single time, the coroner says the same thing: "He took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed." And then you read the story about the poor bastard: his wife was sleeping with his best friend, he'd lost his job, his daughter had been killed in a road accident some months before.... Hello, Mr Coroner? Anyone at home? I'm sorry, but there's no disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I'd say he got it just right. Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can't take any more, and then it's off to the nearest multi-storey car park in the family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's inquest should read, "He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become"?
Not once did I read a newspaper report, which convinced me that the deceased was off the old trolley. You know: "The Manchester United forward, who was engaged to the current Miss Sweden, had recently achieved a unique Double: he is the only man ever to have won the FA Cup and an Oscar for Best Actor in the same year. The rights to his first novel had just been bought for an undisclosed sum by Stephen Spielberg. He was found hanging from a beam in his stables by a member of his staff." Now, I've never seen a coroner's report like that, but if there were cases in which happy, successful, talented people took their own lives, one could safely come to the conclusion that the old balance was indeed wonky. And I'm not s...
