Whatever Love Means

Vic is a nearly-famous rock guitarist thinking about shacking up in south London with his foul-mouthed thirty-something girlfriend Tess; Vic's best friend Joe is a geeky, AIDS-researching biochemist who shares a son and a flash yuppie pad with the beautiful and slightly Irish Emma. On the day of Princess Diana's death Vic falls into bed with Em; a few months later Joe sort of does the same with Tess. If that were all there was to this book, it would hardly be worth bothering with: just another Hampstead (or rather, Herne Hill) adultery novel. What raises it up a considerable notch, quite apart from Baddiel's obvious gift for very good jokes, is his less expected gift for deadpan but dryly insightful prose, and his even more unexpected talent for fleshing out character. Every player in this touching, tragic tale: female as well as male, minor as much as major, villainous alongside virtuous, is eminently believable, and harrowingly feasible. Not quite so convincing is the Princess-Diana-death subplot that forms a background to the early chapters. Like the hysteria over the Queen of Hearts itself, the whole thing rather peters out, and provides little more than an excuse for the book's well-chosen title (it's a famous Prince Chuck quote apropos his then fiancée Diana). Taken as a whole, small misgivings aside, this is a fine and impressive novel: funny, sad, warm, dark, tender, wise and bleakly memorable. --Sean Thomas

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Funny and touching - Rated
I wasn't expecting much of this novel, I confess, but it had been selected by our book club, so I read it. I loved the characters, especially the cynicism of Vic. They were all well drawn, believable people. It's very funny at the start,mocking the hysteria surrounding the death of Diana Windsor, but as the story unfolds I was deeply moved - the thoughts and emotions of Joe so mirrored the things that I've been feeling myself this year, after my husband died. Sad to be in tears over a book at Sandbach Service station, but I couldn't help it.

Who would have thought that David Baddiel would be such a skillful novelist? I must seek out his other books.

Excellent and gripping! - Rated
This was an incredible, ultimately haunting book. I was really impressed by the skill with which the plot builds. Approach it as high-quality contemporary fiction, not a comedy romp(notwithstanding the fact that the language and turn of phrase is often deftly comic.) The ending stayed with me long after I'd finished the book. Read it!

THE LIVING ARE THE LIVING, - Rated
and dead the dead shall stay.

Novels about people having affairs, I often think, must have done more for the cause of celibacy and monogamy than the combined bulls and encyclicals of every Pope since Peter. I bought this one only on the strength of its authorship. David Baddiel is or used to be a comedian, of a quiet and intellectual kind. He specialised in insights and apercus, and anyone who specialises in those runs a constant risk of being a crashing bore. However Baddiel did them better than many, so I was hopeful, and in the event I found this story quite interesting even at the start, and absolutely riveting by the end.

Not surprisingly, this edition hypes the book as being set against the background of the death of Princess Diana. In fact that has very little bearing on the story, but Baddiel does not waste material, there is a very telling parallel towards the end, and of course the book's title quotes a notorious piece of crass insensitivity from the heir to the British throne towards his young and sensitive fiancée. How well does this title fit what happens in the following 300-odd pages? Myself, I'd say `quite well'. The torrid bits of the narrative are near the start, and the events never detach themselves from the emotional and sexual relationships among the four main players, but increasingly as the plot develops it turns into a rather interesting tease - who suspects whom and what? As I read it all, the author does not commit himself to answering the question of what love is, nor can I see any reason why he should. Quite apart from the grown-ups and their `adult' behaviour, there is a baby in this story and he is quite unquestionably loved. It is never so unquestionable among the adults, and in fact the actual word `love' does not seem to occur very often.

What seems to me good without any qualification is the storytelling technique. As the plot thickens, the cross-purposes dialogues with the participants uncertain what their interlocutors might be suggesting are very neatly done. The sub-plots are worked into the main narrative very skilfully I thought, and any unresolved suggestions are always picked up and answered, culminating in a genuine thunderbolt of a conclusion. I felt a twinge of suspicion that the final unravelling of the main mystery might have been not completely in keeping with the characterisation that had been very consistent up until then, with a slight hint of Poirot in the way it is explained. Even if I'm right about that, it is a small price to pay for such an original denouement, and I know that my own sense of involvement increased sharply in the last few chapters.

Baddiel is yer genuine deep thinker in the last resort. We get a bit from him about the contest between love and death - eros (more accurately passion) and thanatos -- and of course eros keeps ahead all the way until finally losing as he must. Of the four main dicers with these two fates one dies, one sails through totally unscathed, one I would definitely not have liked to be, and I don't know what to think regarding the fourth. The living are the living/And dead the dead shall stay. I'm not sure who finishes worst off, nor do I think I'm meant to be any the wiser as to what `love' means.

Not great - Rated
Can't say I was taken by this book. I'm a fan of David Baddiel but I didn't feel he really expanded his characters too well and the plot was a little thin. Having said that, it kept me reading until the end just in case it got more 'unputabledownable'. Ok book but not in the same league as a Ben Elton or Nick Hornby !

Whatever Love Means - Rated
This book takes 40 or so pages to get going, and then it becomes a real page turner. I thought the characterisation was very good, as was the plot, although I did have some suspicions about the twist early on. Despite dealing with tragic themes, there is a decent amount of humour, although tending to be of the dark variety. This would have been a 5 star book if it hadn't been for a couple of holes in the plot (to do with the care of Jackson), and also the fact that some of the passages didn't flow at all well and had to be re-read to get the gist of what the author was trying to say. Overall very good though - recommended.