This is by David Nicholls, and it came out in 2014. It was longlisted for that year's Booker Prize (the year that Richard Flanagan won, with The Narrow Road to the Deep North).

Sometimes books just come out of the blue. This was one such. It wasn't suggested by anything else I'd read. Rather, a friend recommended it; and soon afterwards, it happened to be on sale on Kindle.

It's very good, a brilliant example of the depth that a "light read" can convey, and of that so-hard-to-achieve judicious mixture of pathos and comedy.

Our narrator is Douglas Petersen, 54, a biochemist. His wife, Connie, two years younger, works in the education department of a London museum. They've been married for almost 25 years. But the first page brings us the news that she wants to leave him. Albie, their son -- "to whom I am devoted but who sometimes regards me with a pure and concentrated disdain, filling me with so much sadness and regret that I can barely speak" -- is now 18, and will soon be heading for college. So Connie thinks it's the ideal time for them all to make a new start.

Understandably, Douglas feels as though he's taken a punch to the gut: "The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did."

And then there's the question of the Grand Tour... They'd planned this big swipe through Europe, involving all three of them, in slightly more positive days. Useful for Albie, who's into art; fun for Connie (ditto); and the swan-song of the family holiday. Believably or not (and this is pretty much the only bit where I had such a doubt), Connie pushes for it to go ahead, and Douglas agrees: "I was emptying the dishwasher and confess to being distracted by the low level of rinse aid as well as the ruinous cost of all this travel. But she really did seem very excited by it all, and perhaps it would make a change from our recent family holidays, the three of us restless, bitten and sun-burnt in some expensive villa or fighting for our tiny share of the Mediterranean coast."


How the itinerary eventually pans out

Connie's final decision on leaving, meanwhile, will be put on hold while they're Touring. Of course, this turns the whole thing into a monumental test for Douglas. Can he produce a performance that will reverse his wife's plans, and put him on a better track with his son?

The structure of the book interleaves the increasingly chaotic progress of the Tour with an account of how Douglas, Connie, and Albie have come to this precarious place.

This husband and wife duo have always been really different, and this was initially part of their mutual attraction. We follow them through courtship, and the early days of their marriage. We follow them through the harrowing loss of their first child, and then, eventually -- when they're as healed as bereaved parents ever can be, ie, still more than a little broken -- through the next pregnancy and the birth of Albie.

By this time, Douglas is 36. And the inevitable pile-up begins. He moves to a corporate job, which involves long hours, a lot of commuting, and a marked diminution in the excitement and freedom he used to experience in the field of science. To reduce the commuting, they move from London to the country, which Connie and Albie, city folk at heart, never really adjust to. And, of course, everyone is getting older. As the years go by, energy ebbs.

This book is great on ageing, that great bugbear of us all: "I had always been led to believe," says Douglas, "that ageing was a slow and gradual process, the creep of a glacier. Now I realise that it happens in a rush, like snow falling off a roof." Yep, there is that moment...


In Paris, the family go to watch Francois Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups: "It was a film about poetry, rebellion, the elation and confusion of youth -- not MY youth necessarily, other people's youth -- and it had a profound effect on Albie, who was so engaged in the film that he temporarily forgot to drink excessively..."

All three characters leap off the page, warts and all. And I see bits of myself reflected (mostly unflatteringly) in all them.

Let's start with Albie, who is admittedly a bit tedious. Really annoying at times, to be honest...

But you learn to feel sorry for him, too. A character in Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You? memorably comments: "Whenever I think about my parents I feel guilty. I was just the wrong son for them, it wasn't their fault." I'm not sure Albie knows much about feeling guilty -- maybe that will come later -- but he certainly does seem to feel he is the wrong son for his father... He eventually articulates all his anguish about their relationship: "Everything you do, Dad, everything you say to me, there's this ... contempt, this constant stream of dislike and irritation."

Douglas doesn't see it this way at all, of course. His problem is that his sense of responsibility weighs heavily on him. He can't bear to let things ride, has to be always correcting, limiting, taming, managing. Like so many well-meaning people, he believes that loving means controlling. He wants us to understand that when he clamps down on something, his motivation is not narrow-mindedness or conservatism, but a desire to protect: "I disapproved because I cared."

And I believe him. But, of course, this has lead-balloon qualities of enormous proportions as far as his son is concerned.


Madrid, 2020. The Spanish capital becomes a key location in the narrative

We can't not empathize with our narrator. We respond to his sense of humour. We recognize the effort he made to adjust himself to Connie's world -- and, in fairness, part of what drew her to him was his solid dependability. But such qualities tend to entrench themselves with age, and become more ambivalent (Connie says that being with Douglas is "like carrying a large, old-fashioned fire extinguisher around with her at all times").

He is self-deprecating, and goofy enough to be sympathetic, but not so goofy that he starts to routinely embarrass us. He can be a bit (a lot?) too organized (this comes out in his travel planning, when he presents Connie and Albie with a fixed itinerary, which he hates to deviate from, and insists on keeping his head in his guidebook). And he really overdoes the dad jokes.

But, bless him, he's trying his damnedest to be a good provider, a good husband, a good father -- all the things the patriarchy has told him he should be. It's just that in his attempt to do all things well, he's been ground down by exhaustion and a sense of inadequacy, and starts to lose his sense of proportion: "I did love my son, of course I did, but not when he tried to set fire to things, not when he refused to do his maths homework, not when he spilt apple juice into my laptop, not when he whined because I’d turned off the TV. He would thank me in the long run, and if I did overstep the mark sometimes, if I did lose my temper, snarl when I should have forced a smile then, well, I was very, very tired."

I reckon it's pretty much impossible to be a parent these days... Not that I'm really qualified to judge, not being a parent and all that, but it seems to me that the demands on parents' time and energy and understanding are ever more onerous. This is certainly what Douglas feels. Every day there's some dilemma needing careful evaluation, and when yet another fire needs to be put out, he wonders: "Why had we not been issued with a clear set of guidelines? Had I caused my own parents all this ethical writhing? I was sure I had not. The most illicit act of my teenage years was to sometimes watch ITV. Yet here we were again, the latest instalment of this perpetual radio phone-in."



And yet, despite your sympathy, as you watch the various situations develop, you find yourself constantly thinking, "No, Douglas... Don't do that... Don't react... Don't say anything, Douglas..." And most of the time, the doofus charges right ahead, and soon what you're thinking is: "Oh, Douglas..."

From the beginning, Connie seemed the more natural parent to Albie; and increasingly, Douglas "seemed to have a particular gift for upsetting him". Increasingly, therefore, he becomes what Albie experiences as "an oppressive, overbearing father".

I think it's pretty much acknowledged that we learn our parental roles from our own parents -- either by copying them, or by consciously rejecting their example. Whereas Connie is the product of an informal and noisy household, and has always been easy-going around Albie, Douglas grew up with a remote and conservative father, and has been unable to imagine a more relaxed way of parenting.

What he IS great at imagining, on the other hand, is the apocalypse that Albie and his generation will inherit... Bewildered that his son wants to study photography, as opposed to something that will get him a "sensible" career, he imagines the world collapsing, and "down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat". But when he tries to communicate to his son the urgency of preparing for the future, what Albie picks up is that his dad thinks he's talentless and good for nothing...

You feel for Connie, too, of course. She's so often the one stuck in the middle, buffering the battling husband and son. After putting up with that for 18 years, and after seeing Douglas turning into a joyless person who is very different from the man she married, it's understandable that she wants a break from it all.



Ticking away at the back of all this emotional drama, we have a nice little travelogue, and the contrast between the sublime and the ridiculous that is part and parcel of travel is neatly drawn.

But judged by its stated intention, the Grand Tour -- predictably enough -- goes horribly wrong. First Albie, and then Connie, quit the programme. But Douglas is determined to fix things, so he bats manically on.

I won't give you the twists and turns, and I certainly won't tell you the ending, because part of the charm of the story is that you really want to find out how it's all going to conclude. But the denouement is very well managed. Nicholls avoids out-and-out tragedy, but he doesn't offer us sweetness and light either. He doesn't hand us a Hollywood resolution, but he does leave us with some hope.

All in all, this was a great read. Poignant, real, genuinely tragic. And yet laugh-out-loud funny.