“I was daydreaming about being on the road and being asked questions about this book while I was writing it,” says Robert Webb. “I quite like the flogging it, getting out on the road aspect more than most authors, I think.”
Getting out on the road, of course, is not presently an option, as evidenced by our conversation, which was planned to be in person but is now over a telephone line from locked-down London.
“So that’s a pity. It’s disappointing, obviously, but in the grand scheme of things, ‘disappointed author’ is not going to be first call on everyone’s sympathy.”
Instead, as well as doing interviews such as this one, Webb will be taking part in a series of online events. The book is Come Again, Webb’s first novel, following on his successful memoir How Not to Be a Boy. And it is, aptly enough, well suited to the entertainment needs that come with our new slow pastimes of social distancing and self-isolation.
“It does have some serious moments but it’s mainly a romp and a lark and it’s there to be enjoyed, and people can do with that kind of distraction at the moment.”
A romp and a lark about grief, that is; though to say that Come Again is about grief is both true and misleading. Webb had the idea for it eight years ago while filming Peep Show, and it’s the sort of high-concept story which lends itself to an elevator pitch. Here’s the kernel: a bereaved woman has the chance to travel back in time three decades and save her husband’s life.
The woman is Kate Marsden, a middle-aged IT specialist who was once a world silver medallist in karate but has allowed herself to drift and decline, first with the comforts of marriage and then with the shock of grief.
“She is not the girl next door,” says Webb. “She is a very unusual person,” and all her unique skills come in useful as her story spins out of her control. Webb was aware of the risks inherent in a male author writing “pruriently” from a woman’s viewpoint (the book thankfully avoids, say, Kate describing her body as she contemplates it in the bathroom mirror).
“I approached it warily and respectfully, but it’s not like I was constantly asking my wife, ‘How would a woman open a cupboard?’” And, “so far the women who’ve read the book haven’t gone, ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ So long may that continue.”
The pop-culture references are like finding an old compilation cassette you made to impress a girl in the early 1990s
Come Again is not a simple love story; in fact, the first impression it gives is how ambitious it is. It’s three books in one: first, a romantic comedy – or rather tragedy, as Kate toils through the months after her husband Luke’s death and barrels toward the conclusion that her now valueless life must end. Second, when she wakes up in 1992 with the opportunity to live her life again and save her husband from the slow-growing brain tumour he doesn’t know he has. There’s a touch of science fiction about it, a novel of ideas about the dangers of trying to recreate happiness and the problem of when knowledge can harm as well as help. In the third part, the book accelerates into a thriller, including what Webb describes indisputably as “a car chase and a punch-up”.
But he attributes this multifaceted approach less to ambition than to beginner’s luck, or indeed to “me not quite understanding the rules”. And, as he observes, “you can cross genres like this in movies a bit more”. He reaches for a point of comparison: “I used to quite like Suede, and there’s a quote from [singer] Brett Anderson, he’s talking about those early singles, and he said what was original about it, what helped was that we didn’t really know what we were doing.”
The Suede reference is a pointer that the book is guaranteed to prickle the memory banks of anyone of a similar age to Webb (he’s 47). The pop-culture references are like finding an old compilation cassette you made to impress a girl in the early 1990s. It’s lovingly done, but Webb has an “ambivalence” towards nostalgia. For many British people of his age, “if you think of the 90s, you think of Blair and Britpop, but that came later. Actually the 90s were yet another largely conservative decade and quite a boring one. There was a recession that was painful to a lot of people.”
'I'm not ashamed to say I've written the kind of book where there are goodies and baddies'
Now, of course, that “golden age of total boredom” sounds increasingly attractive. “It would be nice to live in less interesting times,” agrees Webb. In the book, Kate looks back on the 1990s and the politics that is “grey with sunny spells – the frustrating weather of a functioning democracy” with wonder. How very foreign the recent past seems. Naturally, everything before seems prelapsarian with innocence when you’re living through a global pandemic, but – hard though it is to remember life before March 2020 – it was like that even before our “cultural monomania about coronavirus”, in the distant days of 2018 and 2019 when Webb was writing Come Again.
“The book was so heavily influenced by Brexit – there was nothing else, nothing else in the news, and I patted myself on the back that the word only comes up in the book once. It’s inevitable if you set a book in the present day and you’re idiotic enough as I have been to mention contemporary figures” – there are references to Harvey Weinstein and Prince Andrew, among other newsworthy names – “you’re taking hostages to fortune”.
And that’s not all. If you want to get ultra-up-to-date, “of course, I say a couple of disobliging things about Boris Johnson, which frankly I wish weren’t there now”. He adds: “It’s only one of the reasons I’m hoping he pulls through.” The British prime minister, who was in intensive care with coronavirus when we spoke, is now on the mend.
Other cultural hot-button issues are threaded through the novel, but it is, as Webb says, a romp. “I’m not ashamed to say I’ve written the kind of book where there are goodies and baddies. It gets quite broad in places.”
The thriller plot involves deepfake videos and sinister Russians. And it is very unlike most debut novels, because Webb is a well-known celebrity, actor and comedian. How Not to Be a Boy, a memoir about social expectations of masculinity, had 20 offers from publishers. It’s likely that anyone would have published Come Again just out of curiosity. So for Webb, the level of success many writers never achieve – getting published in the first place – goes without saying, but what about how it’s received? Is he concerned that it will be judged not as a novel on its own terms but as a celebrity’s latest project?
“I think it kind of insists on being a novel. I mean the feeling I have now is that it’s a really pleasant place to be because I can’t do anything about it. I’ve finished it. I’m still in that moment of euphoria where I don’t have to write the novel any more. If everyone hates it then there we are, but it’s beyond my control now. I think I’ve written a good book, even if it’s a very strange book. So I think it should be all right.”
And what is it like to write a novel, all that time spent alone when you’re used to more collaborative working, whether as an actor on set or in Webb’s decades-long relationship co-writing comedy with David Mitchell?
“It’s not an attractive quality, but I don’t mind my own company. If I want to spend half an hour deciding where a comma should go, then fine.”
He misses elements of collaboration “where the whole point of the exercise was to make each other laugh”, but now “I don’t have to negotiate with anyone if I think this line is better than that line. There’s an enormous freedom and it’s great to have all that control. But of course that means there’s no one to blame if it’s sh*t”.
Writing Come Again was harder for Webb than How Not to Be a Boy, where he had “real people and real memories, and it’s just a question of selecting the right memories and putting them in the right order”. Here, there’s been a lot more “staring bug-eyedly at the screen in total panic”. In the “weird binary” of novelists, he’s a “planner” rather than a “pantser”. But, “I find that at the level of sentences, I’m having a great time, I really enjoy getting them to work properly. It’s the macro stuff about the plot and how the story’s going to develop that drives me nuts.”
'I've always written stories, so this is not a new thing. I was getting to this'
Anyone who follows Webb on Twitter will know that he’s a literate chap, with a particular worship for the essays of Clive James. What about novelists – who does he admire?
“Ian McEwan, I think I’ve read pretty much everything. I like Martin Amis.” (There’s a very good pastiche of Martin Amis, or rather a bad writer’s impersonation of Amis, in Come Again.) “I’m a huge fan of Jeanette Winterson. Patrick Gayle I always read with enormous pleasure. Carrie Fisher makes me laugh a lot.”
And Webb makes it clear that Come Again is the product not so much of writing a novel as of becoming a novelist.
“I’ve always written stories, so this is not a new thing. I was getting to this. And now there is a proper refocusing of my so-called career that I would like to write some more novels now. I won’t retire as an actor, I can’t afford to and I wouldn’t want to because I like it too much. But writing books is going to be my main job basically now.”
Later in our conversation, Webb moderates this slightly, “before I frighten my agent”, and says simply that “I’m stepping up the writing a bit more than I have been until now”. Either way, with theatres and film sets closed until further notice, there’s no time like the present to sit alone at a desk and stare at a blank screen in panic.
Come Again, published by Canongate, is out April 23rd
