posted on 21 May 2016

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

Hornby’s book was first published in 1995 and there were plenty of lazy critics at the time who said its popularity was down to the fact that it captured the spirit of the age. The Britpop phenomenon was pretty much at its peak and ‘Lad’ culture was emerging as a new, socially sanctioned form of sexism that would disfigure most of our popular culture. Hornby’s book, because it put pop music obscurism at its heart and its key protagonist was a young(ish) man with girlfriend problems,  became associated with this supposed zeitgeist.

In reality, this was a travesty. To start with, I suspect its popularity was in good part down to the fact that it’s brilliantly written – it’s superbly structured,  has an accessible and engaging prose style and allows us to build a relationship with recognisable and entirely sympathetic characters. The story does indeed proceed through the eyes of the confused, sometimes embittered and disillusioned Rob Fleming but he is no stereotypical ‘lad’ and he might well cringe at the notion he is riding the Britpop wave.

Rob, you see, owns his own independent record store – but in case you’re getting the wrong picture here I should explain this is not an entrepreneurs dream because in 1995 such shops existed in many urban centres in ratty premises tucked away down unappealing back streets visited by a collection of vinyl junkies and nutters like me. Rob has two shop assistants who are substantially crazier than him but are probably the closest thing he has to friends. But although Rob himself isn’t socially inept when it comes to getting girlfriends, he just can’t keep them and now, when he finds himself in his mid-30s, he’s started to ask himself why.

We join the story just as Rob’s latest live-in girlfriend, Laura, has just left him. This triggers an almost manic onslaught of self-pity and he’s driven to find out why he is constantly being abandoned by his girlfriends - a version of a mid-life crisis that takes him on a journey to meet all these heartbreakers to find out why they left and, he hopes, to discover they aren’t happy.

If this doesn’t sound like an overly thrilling plot – well, it isn’t. That’s not at all the point though because the plot is entirely secondary to the way in which we are invited to see the world entirely through Rob’s eyes. We see all his weaknesses but also his essential humanity and we are given the chance to empathise with his absurd insecurities and his almost autistic commitment to judging everything through the lens of musical taste (his musical taste of course). Rob judges people by the  credibility of their record collection – owning a cd by Simply Red is a capital offence in his world. When he’s under stress he falls back on his records, obsessing over them and rearranging them on his shelves in a sort of act of personal reaffirmation.

Rob is both despicable and loveable at one and the same time. He is, at heart, essentially decent but he is trapped by his desire not to grow up and conform – we can see that his unwillingness to commit, his desire to keep moving from one woman to another, his mardy stroppiness and his self-centred desire to constantly be praised is the sign of a someone who is irredeemably socially retarded and yet, in reality, we have a sneaky sympathy with him.

And this is essentially the reason the book is such a success – lots of us, especially men,  know a Rob Fleming or his odd menagerie of friends. He is something of an Everyman living through events and having thoughts that so many of us have had ourselves. He says things we cringe at because we have found ourselves saying them and time after time we just want to be able to take him to one side and tell him not to do this......

The book ends, as it has to, ambiguously. We suspect that Rob will try and conform, that he will try and take on the persona of the grown ups he hates so much but we also suspect and maybe hope that he’ll fail.

 

Terry Potter

May 2016