David As Goliath - Hot Press meets David Nicholls

Five years is a long time in publishing, and yet that’s how long has passed since David Nicholls’ all-conquering One Day became the must-have travel accessory on buses, trains and planes the world over. Why the delay? Well, first there was the film adaptation to write, and then he began working on an aborted novel, which he describes as “a necessary waste of time”, before the idea for Us came to him.

Nicholls’ fourth novel tells the tale of Douglas Petersen, a 54-year-old scientist whose wife, Connie, wants to leave him and whose relationship with his son, Albie, is far from what he would have wished. All this familial strife comes to a head on the family’s whistlestop train trip around Europe, a homage to the Grand Tour of old, when Douglas’ life starts to unravel at startling pace.
The flyleaf of Us is inscribed to Nicholls’ father, who sadly passed away when he was “exactly half-way through the book”. Dedicating the book to his dad “seemed natural, because it’s a book about how we become fathers, and the stresses and strains of that, as well as husbands,” Nicholls opines.
“I don’t want it to sound like I was sat there typing and weeping,” he adds, “It wasn’t like that, but it’s the most personal thing I’ve written, I think; personal without being autobiographical.”
For this reader, even more than the sense of his marriage being in trouble, Douglas’ journey is about his relationship with his son.
“If there was a kind of guiding idea, it was about a man’s fear of unrequited love, not just from his wife but from his son,” Nicholls avows. “That seemed to me really painful and actually something that probably exists in quite a lot of families at times...the feeling you’ve grown apart, you don’t talk like you used to. Having become a father myself, that great joy of the delivery room becomes very complicated, often within a very short space of time.”
He’s quick to note, however, that “my father couldn’t have been less like Douglas. I’m not particularly like Douglas, and I certainly was never an Albie. I was never that confrontational, never that rebellious. But it would be very strange to write a book about a father who is looking for his son to mend their relationship at that time of my life and for it not to be quite personal.”
One of the parts of Us that really struck this reader is when Douglas narrates his fears for the world in which his son will grow up, a terrifying litany of horrors that are all too real, from globalisation to religious fundamentalism.
“It is terrifying, isn’t it?” Nicholls sighs. “I really feel that, and part of me thinks that’s a modern thing because of the way society is going, the gap between rich and poor, the difficulties of the economy, globalisation, the environment, all those things he panics about in the book. At the same time, I don’t know if there’s ever a time when parents go ‘oh, he’s fine: he’s going to grow up in a world of full employment’, although perhaps my parents did feel that more than I do. But I do worry about that. A lot of the parents I know do. That’s why there is so much angst about education. Should they be learning Russian? Should they be learning computer coding? So, I feel all of that fear. But I think that must be a constant. It must always have been the case. And I do lose sleep over it.”
Explaining how “that chapter, particularly, was very easy to write,” Nicholls concedes that, “if you have a child then they’re going to experience rejection, unrequited love, embarrassment, grief... they’re going to experience the business of being alive and you have to accept that along with the joy and the fun, even though it’s horrible to imagine any of those things happening to someone you love.”
Despite its occasionally difficult subject matter, Us is not a depressing read and has moments of snigger-out-loud hilarity, such as Connie’s experiment with amphetamines (“I Googled all of that,” he grins) and Douglas’ aversion to fiction, (“quite a common thing”), conceding to read those novels recommended by Connie that are award-winning but not too difficult. All of which brings us neatly to the fact that Us was longlisted for this year’s MAN Booker Prize.
“As soon as I heard, I was overjoyed and then I thought, someone somewhere is writing an article about how it’s a terrible mistake and it doesn’t belong in the company of all those amazing literary authors,” he chuckles. “I am proud of this one, and I think if it was going to happen with any of my books, I’m pleased it was this one. When I was writing it, it felt like it was better than other things I’ve written and I felt strongly that I wasn’t repeating myself and it was a step forward.”
The normally reserved Nicholls admits to being “very proud” of Us. “It’s very hard to think of yourself as a literary writer or a popular writer: it’s not really something you should think too much about. Certainly, I didn’t sit down and think, ‘this time I’m going to write something a bit more literary’ because I think that would be a disaster. It was just what I wanted to write.”
While confessing to not reading his own reviews (“if they’re nice, you become complacent and if they’re nasty, they’re very hard to shake off”), he admits that, with Us, he braced himself for a critical mauling – “because One Day had done so well”.
“Whenever something does well, inevitably it becomes over-rated and so I thought, this time around, the knives are going to be a bit sharper, there’s going to be that backlash,” he reveals. But the critics have been “incredibly generous” so far.
If he ever feels the need, he can forget writing fiction and become a tour guide, as Us is a pretty impressive jaunt around some of Europe’s most beautiful cities. The art galleries and museums that populate its pages are real, but perhaps surprisingly, so are the hotels, particularly the hilarious Amsterdam sex hotel.
“My partner Hannah and I went to a boutique hotel in Amsterdam and the walls were covered with erotic art, every room had a Jacuzzi and it just had a slightly sleazy feel to it, which I wasn’t expecting and which is slightly embarrassing. As with all those terrible things that happen abroad, I thought this is embarrassing but also quite funny, so the Amsterdam sex hotel is definitely a real hotel, as is the Italian hotel with the boiler in the cupboard.”
Undoubtedly hilarious in places, Us also deals with a lot of tough subjects, from infidelity to grief, but with a lightness of touch that Nicholls feels is important. Originally a sit-com writer, he shied away from serious subjects until his time on Cold Feet “where you were sort of obliged to write stuff that was a little bit darker, whether it was about alcoholism, infidelity, marital discord”, and his work on TV adaptations of classics like Tess Of the D’Aubervilles.
“I think after working on those other projects, now I feel a little less self conscious. At the same time, I don’t ever want to lay it on too thick. I’m simultaneously trying to expand the range of things I can write about without getting pompous or mawkish. It’s also probably to do with getting older. I couldn’t have written Us when I started writing fiction: I couldn’t have written this at 31. Your preoccupations change and find their way onto the page. I hope it doesn’t get too heavy going. I’ve always thought my books are comedies but they’re comedies about serious things.”

Us is published by Hodder & Staughton.