| Rating: | ★★★ |
| Category: | Books |
| Genre: | Literature & Fiction |
| Author: | Nick Hornby |
We chanced upon this Nick Hornby (Fever Pitch, High Fidelity- yes it's Hornby, not Horny as some of my wise ass friends would chime in everytime I tell them about it) book as me and a friend was rummaging through a bookstore looking for a perfect book for a friend suffering from a pseudo-breakup of sorts. And a story about a group of suicidal people couldn't be any more hilariously and sardonically apropos.
The story weaves through the four lives that were accidentally intertwined while queueing at Topper's House, a tower block notorious for people committing suicides. After a few heated words and cold slices of pizza, they became kindred spirits. Martin Sharp was convicted and jailed for unknowingly sleeping with a minor, estranged from his wife and children and working for an almost nonexistent cable channel. Maureen has a vegetable of a son who couldnt even speak. Jess suffering from a recent breakup, bad parenting and still living under the shadows of her missing and presumed dead older sister. And JJ, reeling from being recently dumped,and a band split up, scared of being doomed to flipping burgers the rest of his life.
Jess says, 'That's what the four of us had done - crossed a line. I don't mean we'd done anything bad. I just mean that something had happened to us which separated us from lots of other people. We had nothing in common apart from where we'd ended up, on that square of concrete high up in the air, and that was the biggest thing you could possibly have in common with anyone.'
As we follow through their futile attempts at rekindling their old thirst for life by doing something for each other (looking and confronting Jess' ex-boyfriend, meeting up with Martin's ex-wife, taking Maureen off to a vacation), the story although how fascinating it can be, can be long-winded and at one point I would have pushed the characters off the ledge myself.
The story involves the question not of death and dying but of whether it is even moral to continue living when all has lost the will to live. Matty's character (the paralyzed son of Maureen's) makes us want to answer that question. Not being able to speak, and paralyzed his whole life, the four characters felt never more alive than he is, and I must say, more dead than he could ever be. Equipped with witty, patently British humour makes for the dragging and the sometimes farcical part of the book.
I finally finished this book a few days before the New Year. For all it's worth, I'd give Hornby's work 3 stars. At some point it made me chuckle.
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