There's an outbreak of amnesia in contemporary fiction. Following on from SJ Watson's psychothriller Before I Go to Sleep, in which the heroine is condemned to waking up each morning next to a stranger who claims to be her husband, comes John O'Farrell's new novel, which opens with its hero and narrator on a tube train coming into Hounslow East, with no idea why he's there or who he is.
After an anonymous week in hospital, he learns that he is Jack Vaughan, usually known only by his surname, apparently; that he's a teacher in a south London comprehensive; that he's the father of two children; and that he's married to a woman called Maddy, though not for much longer because they're in the final stages of a bitter divorce.
This last fact makes no sense to Vaughan at all because, with his slate a blank, he has been smitten anew by his soon-to-be-ex-wife, blushing in her presence, trying to catch her eye and giving her little waves in court. When his friend Gary reminds him that they are splitting up, Vaughan is only encouraged: "I know – we already have that in common," he enthuses. "She has got this gorgeous little nose that turns up at the end, and her eyes, they are this beautiful hazel brown …" As a few joyful memories of their early relationship begin to return to him, Vaughan becomes convinced that it's the divorce lawyers who've been stoking their mutual hostility – and that he should and can win back Maddy and his old family life.
It's a great set-up and one that O'Farrell makes the most of – not only for laughs, of which there are many, but for a genuine emotional engagement, one that's designed to have readers rooting for Vaughan and his marriage rescue mission while at the same time wincing at the horror and disbelief of those who can remember what that marriage was actually like. Including, rather pertinently, Maddy.
So has she nurtured a partial and negative "Fox News version" of their marriage, as Vaughan likes to think? Or should he distrust the rose-tinged memories that have returned to him? Aren't these happy memories selectively ignoring inconvenient truths about, for example, his drink-fuelled temper? And what is he to make of Maddy's insistence that his current amnesia is but an extension of his old habit of completely forgetting about her existence when his memory was supposed to be working?
It's a rare treat to come across a comic novel that is both thoroughly comic and thoughtfully acute about love, and life, and stuff. And while it jars that Vaughan is not especially tormented by Maddy taking off to Venice with her new boyfriend, ample compensation for that arrives with his very funny, blokeishly inept confrontation with his rival.
Indeed, there are many very funny set-piece scenes in the novel, including a mash-up of legalese with Pokémon arcana, and the humiliation of Vaughan's return to work, when he finds out that he's a humdrum teacher universally known as "Boggy". O'Farrrell also supplies a couple of terrific running gags, particularly Vaughan's increasingly hilarious Wikipedia entry, as edited by his pupils, and a properly funny supporting cast, which includes that rarest of delights, a successfully comic dolt of a best friend.
Hilarious and heart-tugging, this is indeed a memorable comedy.
Harry Ritchie's The Third Party is published by Hodder & Stoughton.
