You Are Here has a flat start. We are introduced to two seemingly introverted characters, both bruised by past loves, who are now so terrified about crossing their carefully constructed boundaries that they avoid most social connection. It makes a pretty dull first couple of chapters: one for each pessimistic narrator, but it’s pretty obvious, this being a romance, that these two will be thrown together against their will, dislike each other to begin with, argue, fall out, have a major crisis and get together for a happy ever after end. And so it happens. And it’s a great read!
You don’t need to know much about the plot or the setting. Yes, it’s one of those constructed journey stories where the plot follows the trail, in this case the Coast to Coast through the Lake District in England. Weather, hills, etc. Although I’ve done parts of this fairly recently, with corresponding rain, wind, hills, the descriptions didn’t really bounce. A bit clichéd perhaps. Doesn’t matter.
Into this setting a match-making friend gets four singles along for the walk and our unlikely pair are the last standing. He’s a geography teacher enthusiastic about bringing history and landscape alive to uninterested kids, and she’s a copy editor with a deadline hanging on a book featuring orgies. This, too, doesn’t matter.
The thing that matters in this book, the thing that keeps the pages turning, is the banter between the two characters, Marnie and Michael. The is the guts of any romance. The setting and the plot are just background. You’ve got to feel the initial, unlikely, attraction turning into something real, like in a movie when the leads look at each other and you find yourself leaning in. I fully believe these two banter their way into love.
She is fast with words, funny and self-deprecating. “‘So we met at the christening.’ ‘We must have.’ ‘Clearly I made quite the impression.’ ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘Don’t worry about it. I have one of those memory-foam mattresses at home and every night it has absolutely no idea who I am.” It does rather beg the question as to why she had been so unlucky with love and why someone so vivacious hasn’t filled her life with other outgoing activities, even if love has let her down. Never mind. He is more complicated, sadly single and compelled to banish self-pity by compulsive walking over the English countryside, not ready, yet, to let the old love die. Marnie warms to him slowly. “She liked his voice, reassuring, the kind of voice used to sell funeral plans on afternoon TV.”
He’s introspective, a loner since his wife left. “…encounters with other men always seemed pre-loaded with rivalry and suspicion, the handshake tight, the smiles too, and he wondered if, after a certain age, men could ever really like each other. The window for friendship was always small, and narrowed with age, and a new male friend after forty? What a strange, uneasy relationship that would be.“
Marnie, at the start, seems to think she is in the wrong story. “While Michael looked at the menu, Marnie looked around. She had long given up hope of encountering anyone young or cool on the journey. The website designers, the cinematographers and war reporters were all somewhere other than in this chippy on a midweek night. Here were the retirees determined to stay active, old school pals meeting up in middle age, long-married couples bickering over itineraries.“
Michael is obviously neither young nor cool. “Beards, for instance, were meant to be metropolitan, and Michael looked like someone who’d spent a year filming puffins in the Hebrides.” Marnie gets the best lines, the queen of backhanded compliments. She describes her ex as attractive in “a cheesy way, the least popular member of a boy band.” Ouch.
The pair banter their way across hills and dales, walking and talking, overcoming the few neat road blocks set in their way and revealing themselves along the road to love.
A solid, no drippy, bitingly funny romance. I read it over a lazy weekend and loved it.
Cristina Sanders' blog 