AUTHOR: ROBERT WEBB / PUBLISHER: CANONGATE/ RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Kate Marsden met her future husband Luke when they were both teenagers at university in York and they were together for twenty-eight years. But Luke has recently died, struck down by an undetected tumour lurking in his brain. Kate, now a tired forty-five-year-old, is devastated, rattling around the disintegrating Clapham home she shared with Luke, knocking back booze, ignoring offers of help from her friends, unable to see the point in going on. She has some damning visual evidence that will incriminate her insufferably smug boss with the unsavoury activities of a notorious Russian gangster but she can’t decide what to do with it. She goes to bed one afternoon, determined to take an overdose when she’s slept off her hangover. But when she wakes up, she’s suddenly eighteen again, back at York on the day she arrived at university but with all her knowledge of her adult life still in her head… and armed with information that could save her future/late husband’s life if he only she can somehow make his nineteen-year-old self listen…
Comedy actor Robert Webb follows up his refreshingly raw autobiography How to Be a Boy with his first novel and it’s a dazzler. The central conceit is clever and concise and commendably vague – is Kate a time-traveller and if so, how has she done it? Or has her mind conjured up an elaborate fantasy in an effort to help her come to terms with her grief? Webb keeps us guessing right the way through his bold, witty, confident novel, populated by richly-drawn, believably realised characters in two very different worlds and his depiction of university life in the early 1990s – the fumbling awkwardness of new friendships, the shabby bars and sticky discos – is achingly accurate and clearly hewn from personal experience. Kate is an unflinchingly-raw figure, outspoken and single-minded, riven by grief and desperate to seize this extraordinary opportunity to change the course not only of her late husband’s life but also her own. Her uni friends are a colourful, extravagant bunch, vividly drawn and instantly recognisable to anyone who has spent time at one of our esteemed higher seats of learning.
Come Again (the title is inspired by a Philip Larkin poem) is a tightly-plotted page turner, an immaculate character study that makes an unexpected gearshift into action/adventure territory in its final section – a tonal about-face that some might find a bit jarring, admittedly – that sometimes threatens to upend the entire narrative but actually enables Webb to pull the threads of his story and his characters together in one final spectacular coup de grâce and to deliver an ending that is perfect in its imperfection. Come Again is written with real wit and insight and an innate sense of how to put together a clever, imaginative and innately human story of life, love and grief and little miracles. More please, Mr Webb.
