It Had to be You by David Nobbs

Names can be tricky things. I didn’t ask for my name, for example. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with it, although it did take me a while to adjust to my middle name. For some reason, it left my teachers convinced I couldn’t spell Joseph, even when they could see I knew how to spell Christopher. I guess I have my dad to thank for that, seeing as he pushed for the name of an Austrian jazz musician who was a particular hero of his. Whenever I’d complain about it growing up, Mum would always remind me that Dad had been campaigning for Miroslav, which would’ve caused far more conversations about spelling when it came to some of my teachers.

The other conversation my name could inspire in people back then was more to do with my initials – CJ. For a long time, my parents’ friends would hear my initials and then draw themselves up a little and, in a rather grand version of their voice, declare ‘I didn’t get where I am today…’, which would lead to a lot of adults giggling around me. Being young, and not entirely keen on being laughed at, I would always wonder what was going on. It took a while before my parents had to explain that there was a character on TV called CJ who a lot of people found very funny.

I didn’t actually watch Reggie Perrin myself until about three years ago. It wasn’t any form of protest, I just never felt a pressing need to see the actions of my namesake. After all, my parents’ generation had their CJ, but I’d adopted Allison Janney’s CJ in The West Wing as my own chosen Patron of the Initials.

During lockdown, the BBC put a lot of old sitcoms back in BBC 4. We watched Yes, Minister, which I’d not seen since I was old enough to get irritated by teachers pointing out you don’t spell Joseph like that. And we watched Reggie Perrin. It was a strange show. Far stranger than I’d expected, if I’m being honest. It didn’t have the same tone as a lot of other classic sitcoms I’d seen from that time. It wasn’t homely or comfortable. It squirmed in its office chair. It tapped restlessly on the windows of the train it rode to work. It could also suddenly turn anarchic without any warning at all. Under the rhythms and repetitions of those catchphrases and characters, ‘Super’ ‘Great’, there was a real sense of a darker unhappiness driving its characters forward. You could almost think of it like Anthony Newley’s The Strange World of Gurney Slade. These could very easily be characters trapped inside a sitcom.

Looking into the background of the show, I found out that the writer, David Nobbs, had actually based the show on a series of books he’d written. Deciding to see if the books had the same atmosphere, I started to hunt them out in second hand bookshops, where one day I managed to score the first three. They weren’t necessarily amazing reads. They were funny, certainly. They were also, at times, a little dated and pedestrian in places. What fascinated me were those darker elements of the story. Particularly some that never made into the TV show. One relationship in particular, which borders on incest, is treated with a sharp, unforgiving eye and a raised eyebrow.

Something in that juxtaposition of comedy, satire and commentary that really impressed me. Which is what lead to me deciding to read one of Nobbs’ other books. It Had to Be You shares some common ground with Reggie Perrin. It’s trapped in the gardens and dual carriageways of modern suburban living. It features a man struggling inside and outside his marriage, surrounded by a gaggle of frustrated characters. There’s a job at a faceless company. A speech to make. Children and in-laws with their own issues. There are a lot of parallels, but the driving difference for It Had to Be You is that the book starts with a death. A real death. There’s no fakery here.

The opening shows us three people. Our lead character, James Hollinghurst, rushing into work for a meeting, shouting at radio, barely keeping both eyes on the road. His wife, Deborah, who is heading somewhere to meet another man. And also the other man himself, who remains nameless. In fact, as he checks into a hotel he gives a fake name which leads to all manner of other problems for him as the book goes on.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Deborah is killed in a car crash. Nobbs treats the death gently, honestly. It’s almost on a par with Daphne Du Maurier’s stunning and very human ending to Don’t Look Now. The tone of his writing, in a similar way, really carries you through the harder moments of the book by never flinching or switching the prose to purple. Whereas the Perrin books occasionally felt a little skimpy to me, It Had to Be You doesn’t look away from the mistakes or cut quickly to get a joke. We get to watch the bruises blemish. He doesn’t push for gore or blood or shock with Deborah’s death. If anything, later on, Nobbs shows that he feels that there’s already far too much of that sort of thing on TV as it is.

After Deborah fails to avoid a Porsche attempting to overtake at speed on a country lane, the story follows James, and occasionally the nameless man who was trying to start an affair with Deborah, over the course of the week leading up to her funeral. And, whilst Nobbs could be said to be borrowing the skeleton of one of his most famous creations, he is building something a little starker here. A little bleaker and more honest with itself. He certainly doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to James’ thoughts, his attitudes towards the people around him, the sheer vortex of confusion he finds himself trapped in after the police appear to tell him about his wife’s untimely death.

Really, what Nobbs uses here is tenderness. This is a quiet, tender, personal flavour of apocalypse. The world comes crashing down around one man who is left untethered when he loses a wife he wasn’t sure he really loved when they were together every day. That unexpected wound starts to uncover all manner of questions around his life. His relationship with a woman he was having an affair with begins to fall apart once he finds he’s free to pursue it. His relationship with his estranged daughter changes as he starts to try and communicate with her through her well meaning lover. His relationship with his son, who moved away to Canada, is strained when he comes back to at the exact wrong time to learn some harsh truths about his father.

Nobbs’ rarely shifts the story away from James. We see him drinking enough to worry the people around him. We see him shouting at the radio, but unable to talk to taxi drivers. We see him hate himself. We see him try to forgive the people around him. We also get occasional, anonymous glimpses of the man who was having an affair with Deborah as he desperately tries to retrieve his wedding ring after leaving it at the hotel and the staff there forwarding it onto the fake address he gave for the room.

In some ways, there is something quite old fashioned at the beating heart of It Had to Be You. There is a comedy of errors that keeps the pages turning. There are people breaking each other’s hearts or trying to hide the truth from each other or saying completely the wrong thing in the wrong room. As we spend the majority of that time with James, we also get to see the sheer level of noise in his head as he tries to keep himself together around the people in his life. There’s also something a little bleaker here. The smiling vicar who comes to arrange the wedding can inspire cringes that nearly curl your teeth. James’ company is having to make cutbacks thanks to a building financial crisis, leading to some sad and awkward conversations with his assistant, which feels a very familiar ground from the days of Reggie I Perrin, but under a more honest gaze. Couples debate about whether they can really afford to miss their table booked a five star restaurant or their centre court tickets for a funeral. There’s also a murder somewhere off in the wings. There’s jealously and rage, and quiet and unavoidable truths that leave James Hollinghurst unable to live with himself.

There is also, I should point, a lot of humour. It Had to Be You is a surprisingly funny book when you consider the subject matter. David Nobbs is incredibly good at building a life around his characters which they tolerate but never exactly leave. Again, it’s that angst of being trapped, only the brilliant idea with this story is James Hollinghurst has technically found the door to his self-imposed cage open. He doesn’t entirely sure how quickly or easily he can really leave. Or if it was ever actually a cage.

As the funeral approaches, we watch him start to question his place in the universe. David Nobbs was a keen humanist, and he doesn’t hold back on his own views here as we watch James ponder about the place of religion in his life. Or about what people call love when they try to talk about their lives together. He also examines memory, nostalgia, the roots of the friendships that James has always had in his life, for one reason or another. His relationship to his two more successful brothers certainly shifts as the story goes on. It’s all done very naturally, very quietly. This isn’t a loud book. It isn’t riddled with comic set pieces or the repetition of a sitcom. Both the funeral and a speech that James has to make about his struggling company aren’t necessarily rife with jokes or impending blunders, but they do keep the story moving forward and they are tender enough to raise a smile whilst tugging at the occasional heartstring. It’s all a very subtle, very well paced, under the surface breakdown, as James begins to realise just how much of his life was lived through a fantasy of what he thought he wanted, not what he actually wanted.

I don’t know if the people looking for the catchphrases and comfortable, familiar archetypes of Perrin will find exactly what they want here. I could imagine them feeling they’re looking at the ghosts of them across these pages. For me, though, this feels like a more realised and accomplished attempt to tackle some of the similar subjects in a more modern setting. James Hollinghurst is a man aware that some of his opinions and urges no longer fit with the world around him. He is also, in many ways, his own worst enemy throughout a story that leaves you wondering how well he will manage to hold his new life together as he moves beyond the grief of losing his wife too soon. His author has certainly set up his future to help him recover if he decides to take that path. But Nobbs has also written James so well that you have to wonder how easily he will let himself begin to really heal after what he’s been through over the course of this book.