On the approach to Richmond, they passed a sign, a large board with a map of the path they were following, the scrawled red line from west coast to east, an arrow two-thirds of the way across labelled ‘You Are Here’.
‘Look at what we did together,’ she said.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s quite something.’
‘And this . . .’ She measured out the remainder of the journey, a hand-span. ‘This is nothing,’ she said, and wondered, What if he asked me to stay on and finish the walk? Is that what he wants? If he asks me, if he asks me, I will. I will stay with him and walk into the sea.’
I didn’t take any notes as I read David Nicholls’ Here You Are. I didn’t even jot any pages numbers on the inside back cover, bits I liked or passages to go back to, threads I was following or (my usual bare minimum) a likely candidate for the title and lead-in quotation for a possible blog post. (I had to leaf through it again to find one to use!) I just read it straight through, which is not by any means a bad thing—although given the kind of reader I usually am, that perhaps suggests that it’s not a particularly deep or ambitious novel. I think that’s a fair assessment, actually, and there’s nothing wrong with that! In fact, the novel suited me perfectly in the moment, as I have been tired lately and finding things in general a bit wearing, so anything more demanding would probably have defeated me.
So when I say You Are Here is an amiable, intelligent, pleasantly predictable second-chance romance, I don’t mean to damn it with faint praise at all. Nicholls has a gift for characterization, and the leads here are just complex and troubled enough to add some shadows—to tether the story’s feel-good arc to some plausible sorrows and struggles so that it isn’t such light reading it feels insubstantial. He’s also very good at setting, and You Are Here lets him make the most of this, as it takes place on a walking trip across England (there are even maps!). It rains a lot, probably realistically, but even through the fog and clouds there are views:
The peaks were all around them now, outlined sharply against each other, like old-fashioned theatre flats. They walked a ridge, still a climb but not too arduous, the ground easy-going, short, tough grass like office carpet, until they were standing at a viewpoint, a rocky crown, toothed like battlements, the kind of place you might go to summon dragons.
It was a clever thought on Nicholls’ part to make his hero a geographer, so we don’t get just scenic descriptions but lots of little details about rocks and ridges and plateaus and massive incremental changes across inconceivable stretches of time—I think I found his mini infodumps more interesting than the heroine did, which may not bode well for their implied HEA!
The other clever thing about You Are Here is how neatly the walking trip fits the underlying movement of both plot and character: that it’s obvious (in a novel, a literal journey is pretty much always also a metaphorical journey) doesn’t make it dull, and the gradual progress of our protagonists towards tolerance, then interest, then understanding, then liking, then affection as they trudge and clamber and stroll towards each new stopping point is well done. Even though it seemed pretty clear what their final destination was, the route they take to get there is not, unlike the literal journey, mapped out ahead of time, and it was satisfying arrivingthere with them after the requisite Big Misunderstanding.
That’s another romance term, of course, and it is interesting to me that Nicholls’ novel so clearly fits all the conventions of the genre, except (as far as I can tell) in how it is packaged and marketed, which is certainly not as “genre fiction.” The ultimate test of these imperfect distinctions is where a book gets shelved in the bookstore, and I feel confident that You Are Here will be in the Fiction section, not the Romance section (where there is even that option). It is longer and richer in detail than a fair number of genre romances—I would even cautiously say that it is better written in these respects than most of the romances I have sampled, the formulaic underpinning less conspicuous and other more writerly elements predominating. (I am cautious because of course I have read only a small sample of the vast array of options, and some of the ones I have read are very well written, though my enthusiasm for the form has subsided somewhat since my long-ago conversion.) Not all fiction with a romance in it is romance fiction, just as not all fiction that includes a crime is crime fiction: maybe that’s really all that’s at stake here, that Nicholls has written about a romance, he hasn’t written a romance.
Anyway, whatever kind of novel it is, it’s an enjoyable one. It even made me think that one day I should go on a walking holiday! (That seems pretty unlikely, now that I’ve put the novel down, as I’m not at all a “carry a heavy rucksack up hills in pouring rain” type, but someday I would like to see some of the landscapes they cross.) I really liked Us as well, so Nicholls is two for two with me so far!
Novel Readings 