It will resonate with anyone who grew up in a small town surrounded by ring roads and garden centres, convinced real life was going on somewhere else entirely. A longing for lost time, missed chances and vanished youth pervades the book. Sweet Sorrow suggests we never really get over our first love. The 90s narrative ends with Princess Diana’s death at the close of August (a symbolic loss of innocence), and we are plunged forward 20 years to find Charlie married and ruminating sagely on the fate of his father, and his relationship with Fran.
These things can co-existĬharlie instinctively knows summer’s lease hath all too short a date, and he lies awake at night “fearful of a future I could not imagine”. Read more: No, Netflix is not the death of books, despite the sales figures. But Charlie is no Romeo: he describes losing his virginity with Fran as “the most extreme version yet of not knowing what to do with my hands”. As Charlie and Fran fall in love, they quote lines to each other, culminating in a scene at a rave, with everyone drunk and flying on E, where the lovers finally kiss at dawn. The milieu is strictly provincial am-dram, a sub-culture Nicholls never loses an opportunity to satirise. Shakespeare’s tale of star-crossed lovers is central to Sweet Sorrow, as Nicholls echoes Shakespeare’s text throughout. Crucially, he is never sure what to do with his hands. Here, Charlie finds himself continually out of his depth, open to ridicule and class condescension. In order to spend more time with Fran, he must join her acting troupe, Full Fathom Five, who are putting on a production of Romeo and Juliet. Read more: Francesca Segal on writing about the premature birth of her twins: ‘It took me a long time to realise the girls were mine’ It’s fitting he meets his Estella in a sylvan setting, a nod to both Great Expectations and Le Grand Meaulnes, apt in a novel stuffed with literary allusions. He resolves to “read every book, see every film, listen to every song that Fran had ever mentioned”. Yet he soon discovers Fran is candid, funny and culturally literate in a way he can never hope to be. They wore “vintage floral dresses and ironic T-shirts that they’d screen-printed themselves”. “Chatsborne kids were posh, were arty stoners,” Charlie tells us in a voice always ready to deflate pretension. David Nicholls (Photo by Ian Gavan/Getty Images for BFI) ‘Cocktail of humour and sincerity’Īnd then, while reading “in the long grass of a wild meadow that overlooked our town”, he meets Fran – the archetypal girl of superior status and looks, a pupil of Chatsborne school.
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