This was one of those books, adorned with the "3 for 2" sticker, purchased on a whim from a very high stack in Waterstones, Nottingham, which was supposed to "fill in" between the weightier tomes queued up on my bookshelf. The cover and the blurb yell Hornby/Parsonsesque chick-lit at you; I duly expected light, quirky, moderately satirical, sort-of romantic comedy out of this.
And, indeed, that's what I got. But not only.
This is an easy reading book, one you're keen to get another few dozen pages out of when the opportunity arises. It is funny, full of observational humour about why people do things, and about the Britain that happened in the twenty years following the protagonists' graduation in 1988, which is the book's starting point. It is full of moments of agreement and recognition - yes, he got it exactly! (It may help that, but for a single year, the graduation date matches my own - this is my era too.)
But as I read it, I kept getting this feeling that there was a bit more to this book than your average book-for-the-commute contemporary comedy. The observation of the characters and their motives was a bit too insightful, and I found myself knowing them, caring about them, rather more than I expected. The observations about life, love, work, society, the media, capitalism et al were not the easy-assent simplifications you might expect, but admitted of complexity, ambiguity and an aversion to judgement. The sadness in the book somehow went beyond the compulsory melancholy of the romantic comedy, and possessed an unexpected force. In this respect, the book in some ways resembles the film Four Weddings and a Funeral: you may appear to be on safe comedic ground most of the time, but watch out, it can pack a hefty emotional punch when you don't expect it.
The story is in effect a protracted love-story, mainly unspoken, between two socially and temperamentally contrasting characters, earnest northern girl Emma Morley and over-confident quasi-toff Dexter Mayhew. It begins with a seeming one-off romantic encounter between them the day of their graduation from Edinburgh university and charts their largely parallel, but sporadically touching lives in London thereafter. Emma slogs honestly, most divertingly in a north London Tex-Mex restaurant from hell, before gradually achieving many of her ambitions. Dexter burns bright in typically 90's London C-list stardom, but also to a large extent burns up and out. Just as their charts cross, so do their lives, for their friendship, the "Em and Dex" thing, remains more-or-less constant, a fixed point for both while everything else spins around them, in or out of control.
Does it sound like typical, romantic comedy stuff? Well, that's my point; it is, yet while it is doing a good job of the romantic comedy, the quality of the writing and the insight behind it give it a depth which places it, I think, in a different league.
In the last review, I suggested that for all those who harbour a dream of the Great Novel within, the world-changing Freedom is probably the sort of book they dream of. However, just like Emma, also dreaming of Freedom, who ultimately accepts that it may have to wait a bit longer, I suspect many of us would settle for One Day in the meantime.
Recommendation? Well, of course. And with the bonus that you really can read this one quickly. Just watch out for the ending…
Chick-lit cover? But a surprisingly weighty book.
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