All the Hopeful Lovers

In his previous novel, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, William Nicholson introduced readers to the fictional village of Edenfield and to the lives of its various inhabitants. He evoked all their quiet yearnings, quotidian frustrations, petty jealousies and spontaneous acts of decency in a style that's rarely, if ever, found in the modern English novel: a kind of knowing, sharp-eyed tenderness.

The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life was set in May 2000. Its sequel, All The Hopeful Lovers, is set slightly more than eight years later, in December 2008. Though hugely entertaining, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life bore the signs of being the first novel in a projected series. It switched from chapter to chapter between a large cast of characters, granting each one space in which to come alive, without permitting anyone to dominate and therefore distort the intricacy of the overall design. All The Hopeful Lovers deals with a smaller cast and is therefore noticeably faster paced - in the same way that water flows more quickly as the river narrows. You find yourself racing through it, then going back to savour its many wonderful moments of wisdom, insight and humour.

The novel begins with Belinda - nearly fifty, mother of two - confiding to her friend, Laura, that although she's always been impeccably faithful to her husband, Tom, she sometimes wishes she could have an affair. Her daydream of infidelity is prompted partly by the rueful acknowledgement that she's "much better at sex" than she was in her twenties and partly by the fact that her nineteen-year-old, Chloe, is now as blond and beautiful as she once was, with an energetic love life. Yet no sooner has she given voice to her frustrations than she discovers Tom himself is having an affair.

Tom is, in a sense, passing Belinda in the opposite direction. When he was young, he felt undesired and always experienced intimacy with women - Belinda included - as a kind of dispensation, for which he should be grateful. Now, balding and paunchy, he is an object of passion at last and is both thrilled and exquisitely consoled by the fact.

Tom's lover is Meg, younger sister of Alan Strachan, who, in the previous book, was an English teacher and struggling playwright. Alan is now a successful screenwriter - "successful" in the sense that he writes full-time and earns well, in spite of having to endure interminable meetings during which his work in pawed over and disimproved by producers and their assistants. He is married to Liz, a freelance journalist, and is father to six-year-old Caspar and stepfather to Alice, who has just started University.

Alice is Chloe's antithesis - the same age but still boyfriendless and lacking any of her erstwhile schoolmate's sexual confidence. None the less, Chloe takes an interest in her, trying to set her up with Laura's son, Jack, though her attempts at match-making are complicated by the fact that Jack - recovering from his first, failed lover affair - has a crush on Chloe herself. Meanwhile, Jack's sister, Carrie, befriends an elderly painter called Anthony Armstrong, who has taken up residence in a derelict cottage near her home. Along with Alan Strachan, Armstrong illuminates the book's other principal theme - the perils and frustrations of the creative life, where achievement and recognition can have so little to do with one another. Once celebrated, now long forgotten, Armstrong is none the less forced by a young documentary maker to confront the extent to which he has been eclipsed the likes of Joe Nola, a provocative and opportunistic conceptual artist who used to be his pupil.

There is a slight danger, in summarising All The Hopeful Lovers' plot, of making it sound like a high-toned soap opera. But there's so much more to it than that. Nicholson delves deep into his characters' live. Quite often, when novelists do that, their prose begins to show signs of strain, creaking with effort the deeper they go. But Nicholson is able to unearth intimate truths and bring them, glistening, to the surface with an enviably light touch. When he conveys, in the simplest yet most resonant terms, the quiet desperation of a supporting character like Matt Early, the reader is moved in an uncomplicated way:

"I'm a man living my life as best as I can. I love music. I care for a sick mother. I feel trapped. I have long moments of pure joy. I'm lonely. I worry that my eyes aren't as good as they were. I'm too easily enraged by little things. I'm growing older. I miss my Dad."

Yet he also draws the reader into a similar understanding of the adulterous Tom Redknapp, not excusing his actions, but placing them in the context of a lifetime's yearnings and frustrations:

You get so that it seems to be the natural order of things, that you want something with all your being, a touch, a kiss, a generosity of the body, but it never comes, you don't deserve it, such bliss is for others. But knowing this does nothing to diminish the longing. Instead, every moment of the day is made just a little more burdensome by the sadness, the gap between the aching need and the reality of life. [...] We men are so full of shame. These simple urges, these primitive desires, they have low status in civilised society, they represent an immature stage of human relationships. Which is bullshit. These simple desires are all the glory we'll ever know on earth.

There are no heroes or villains in All The Hopeful Lovers. As you would expect from a novel by an acclaimed screenwriter, it's dauntingly well structured, but it has an equally careful emotional patterning. Decency is rewarded, but not always. Self-regard and opportunism are only sometimes punished. Almost all the younger characters are in some kind of emotional turmoil and are granted the privilege of having their pain taken seriously rather than treated as mere immature foolishness. Almost all the older characters feel as besieged by dissatisfaction and irrational longing as when they were young, but are not mocked for the fact. It's an extremely moral book, yet at the same time, a non-judgemental one. You're drawn in by its smooth, readable prose style then caught unawares by insights that unsettle and fascinate in equal measure because they run so counter to received opinion - as when seventeen-year-old Carrie, sitting for a portrait by Anthony Armstrong, confesses to a sense of disappointment in life:

"Aren't you a bit young to be disappointed by life?"
"Why? Does it get better?"
He laughs at that.
"No," he says. "It gets worse."
"There you are, then."

She realizes she likes him. No adult has ever admitted it to her before. It gets worse. There's an odd consolation in that. It's the fake passion she can't stand. People squealing with joy like game show hosts and everyone throwing their arms around each other and saying ‘Omigod!'

Counterfeit emotion and lazy thought are the enemies in All The Hopeful Lovers. It reflects intensely on so many aspects of modern life and compels the reader to do the same. That it should give so much delight along the way is testimony to what a valuable and unusual novel it is.