Whatever Love Means is an easy enough read about two couples in London around the turn of the millennium, the boys best mates, one married, the other a bit of a predator, with all the ingredients Baddiel seems to think we want to read about: sex, love, death, twists, secrets. Def a holiday read, there’s nothing much very philosophical here, no bigger picture other than creepy Vic having an affair with his best friend’s wife, and an unpicking of why her car crashed into a wall. “Whatever Love Means”, of course, is the famous line of Prince Charles’s in response to his engagement to Di – a stunningly cold response to love, which sums up the book really. None of these characters seem to have discovered the meaning of love. So why has it made my good books list? Well, I enjoyed the obviousness of it. Also, I think the stilted and stifled emotions of the characters deserve exploring. A good book, perhaps, for students of creative writing to unpick. Discuss: How might different people receive the book; what does the author want us to feel; is he in control of his characters?
It’s so obviously a male writer. Does Baddiel realise how pronounced his lens is?
The woman taking her coat off had ash-blonde hair and speckled green eyes, and a pleasing symmetry of feature, but seemed otherwise unremarkable…
The old flecked green-eye cliché, impressive eyesight across a crowded room. Honestly! Well, I suppose he doesn’t admit he’s simply looking at her tits, which would be more honest, but not as poetical. And here’s another one:
…she seemed to be smiling directly at Joe, although that wasn’t very likely – her hair was piled up on her head, and falling across her face in strands; her skin looked touchable, made for male hands to glide across…
Cringe.
Vic is is sleeezy, live-for-the-moment musician, with a part-time live-in girlfriend called Tess. More about Tess in a moment. Somehow Vic ends up renting a dirty squat as a love nest for Joe’s rather lovely wife, a young mother to whom Baddiel has given a terminal diagnosis to help the plot along. I simply can’t imagine women readers believing this turn of events. In your dreams, Vic (and by extension, blokes, generally). We’re told a bit about Emma, but never get inside her head. Why would she?
The girlfriend, Tess, is smarter, keeping Vic at an emotional arms-length. She has a life outside the story. She travels a lot, is a professional wine taster. This blatant lack of femininity Baddiel explains with Tess talking to Joe:
‘You know, Joe, I used to think – for a long time, I used to think that I had sort of a man’s brain. That I thought more like a man than a woman.’ He nodded. ‘But now I’ve come to realise that whatever it is I do think like, it’s not like men; because men don’t really think like men.’ She shook her head. ‘They think like boys.’
Interesting, hey? Independent women taking on men’s roles, as men revert to boys.
A slight spoiler alert coming up – its out of context so wont really spoil things, but I do want to emphasise the very blokey feel of the prose (look away now if you don’t want to know). It’s how Baddiel gets down to the absolute essence of things.
..he’d killed her twice it seemed – once by fucking her, and once by not fucking her.
Perhaps what I find interesting with this book is the zeitgeist feel of the writing. Maybe all the millennium angst was as simple as that: either way, you’re fucked.
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