Whatever Love Means - David Baddiel > Reviews > Hindsight can be a dangerous thing

Author's product rating:   

Would you listen to it again?	Yes
Story	Good
Characters	Good
Listenability	Pretty compelling but not addictive
How does it compare to similar audio books?	Quite good
How does it compare to audio works by the same author?	Quite good

Advantages:	easy reading, straightforward plot
Disadvantages:	strong language might offend some more kindred spirits

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

As someone who grew up in the age of “The Mary Whitehouse Experience” and then saw Mr. Baddiel’s rise to fame through his assorted engines – “Newman and Baddiel”, “Fantasy Football League”, “Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned” and “Baddiel’s Syndrome”, as well as the Three Lions Anthem (1996 and 1998 versions!), I was expecting this book to be a funny one, loaded with put downs and sarcasm, the two cornerstones of Baddiel comedy.

The book is set, at the start, around the most hysterical time of the last five years, around the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Indeed the title has been cleverly taken from a remark uttered by Prince Charles when he and Diana had got engaged, in February 1981, when he was asked on a BBC TV interview:

Interviewer: Are you happy?
Prince Charles: Very Happy.
Interviewer: And, of course … in love?
Lady Diana Spencer: Of course.
Prince Charles: Whatever loves means…

Of course hindsight helps us to make something of this throwaway line, as is also the case in Baddiel’s book, with one character describing hindsight as “bollocks” as it is very free to interpretation. As the story starts, an affair is just being consummated for the first time, and this provokes the reader to think, what was I doing when Diana died. I can remember clearly what I did, I was getting myself a very large glass of water to recover from a very bad hangover in rural Somerset, and in the torrent of rain that cut off all power from the house, and mercifully saved us from the blanket coverage of the events, which we were to be bombarded with for days, and I spent the morning stopping us from getting flooded. As for the day of the funeral, I was in New York, shopping on Fifth Avenue the day before my cousin’s wedding. Enough of the flashbacks though!

The book centres around four central characters, Joe (a research scientist, searching for a cure to AIDS), Emma (his wife – a furniture designer from Ireland, and mother of their child Jackson, with an elderly mother, Sylvia, on the periphery), Vic (a musician who seems to drift from doing music for one advert after another) and Tess (his partner, a wine buyer). Vic and Joe have been friends since their university days, and are quite a chalk and cheese combination. Joe is the serious type, soft spoken and settled in life. Vic however is exactly the opposite, feeling that his talents have not been fully appreciated, and this might explain his desire to embarrass and shock, pretending in a bizarre way that he has Tourette’s Syndrome, which is his attempt to justify the high amount of expletives that leave his mouth, with many expletives found in Chaucer (!) leaving his mouth on a regular basis.

Over the course of the book, we see the spiralling circle of deceit that develops as the relationships between the couples develops. The language is fairly raw, with a near animal instincts approach to it all, but in all fairness, we would hardly expect a non-laddish and flowery style to come from David Baddiel’s pen really. In certain ways it has a Hornby-esque echo to it – the Lambretta and thirty something lifestyles of the main protagonists being somewhat similar to Hornby’s High Fidelity.

The subdividing of the book into three parts helps to intersperse the events and the quotations (of which the one listed above appears before the third part) help to place it all in a slightly clearer context.

Without spoiling the plot of the book, which seems to have a slight mirroring of real life, and which is quite plot intensive – there is a lot going on, and the chapters are short, and chop from one character to another – usually named after the character around whom they centre, so you have to keep your wits about you. However there are a couple of key events that seem so incongruous to the main plot that they leap out at you as a change in the storyline, and as having something of great bearing to the story held within them. The way the book concludes leads you almost searching for answers to a few unsolved questions, and fortunately there is a denouement, although its effect is perhaps blanched somewhat by the craziness of the preceding chapter, which seems to be over the top, although it needs to be, in order to tie up the assorted floating loose ends of the book.

The book stands out with its cover showing a pair of female eyes on a bright (violent!) yellow background. At £6.99 in paperback by Abacus, I would certainly recommend it to prospective readers, especially as a book to take with you on holiday. A few things nagged me about the book, although that might be the fact that having done a lot of literary critiques, my eye was perhaps too focussed on nit-picking, rather than sitting back and enjoying the book.

It took a while to get into the story, but once the pre-amble was over, I proceeded to finish the book at a rate of knots, and now need another book to read. I would thoroughly recommend this book, although I feel that David Baddiel’s writing talent still needs to develop, and possibly move away from the comedian in him.