A Long Way Down

What's inside (10 sections)

1. The four
2. Maureen and Matty
3. The pact
4. The angel
5. Tenerife
6. The roof again
7. What the book gets right
8. What it does not
9. Key takeaways
10. FAQ

Four people try to kill themselves on the same roof on the same night, and the joke is that they interrupt each other. That is the premise of Nick Hornby's 2005 novel, and it is a premise that could go wrong in about six different ways. It could be tasteless. It could be sentimental. It could turn suicide into a quirky meet-cute. Hornby knows this, and the book spends most of its length trying to earn the right to be funny about something that is not funny at all.

It mostly succeeds. A Long Way Down was published by Riverhead Books in the United States and Penguin in the UK, and the edition cited here runs 352 pages. It is told in rotating first-person chapters by four narrators, each with a distinct voice and a distinct reason for being on the roof of Toppers House in London on New Year's Eve.

The four

Martin Sharp is a former television presenter. He was famous, he had a wife named Cindy and two daughters, and then he slept with a fifteen-year-old girl and went to prison. He has been out for a while. He is articulate, self-pitying, and convinced that the world has been unfair to him. He is the novel's most difficult character because he is charming enough to make you forget how bad he is.

Maureen is fifty-one, a single mother, and the primary caregiver for her son Matty, who has severe disabilities. She works, she cares for Matty, and she has no life of her own. Her chapters are quiet and painful. She is not dramatic about her suffering. She simply describes a day, and the day is unbearable.

Jess is eighteen, rude, impulsive, and the daughter of a government minister. Her sister Jen disappeared years ago, and the loss has hollowed out the family. Jess is the one who talks the others out of jumping, or into delaying, depending on how you look at it. She is also the one who creates most of the mess.

JJ is an American, thirty-five, a failed musician who delivers pizzas in London. His band almost made it. His girlfriend left. He is grieving a life that did not happen, and he is self-aware enough to know how ordinary that grief is. His chapters are the funniest and the saddest.

The four voices are the book's main pleasure. Hornby writes them as four different kinds of denial. Martin denies that he did anything wrong. Maureen denies that she has a self. Jess denies that her sister is gone. JJ denies that his music was never going to work. Each denial is a survival strategy, and each one is also a lie.

Maureen and Matty

The character who stays with me is not Martin, though Martin is the most vivid. It is Maureen, because her chapters do not have jokes in them. She gets up, she washes Matty, she feeds him, she takes him to a day center, she works, she collects him, she puts him to bed, and then she sits in a chair until it is late enough to sleep. The routine is not a metaphor. It is a description.

Matty is never seen directly. He is a presence in her narration, a body that needs lifting, a person who cannot be left alone. Hornby avoids the trap of making him saintly or symbolic. He is just a young man with severe disabilities, and his mother is tired. The novel does not ask you to pity her. It asks you to notice how much of her life has been spent on tasks that nobody sees.

Maureen's reason for being on the roof is not dramatic. She is not grieving a great love or a ruined career. She is grieving the fact that her life has narrowed to a single room and a single obligation, and that she cannot see a future in which it widens. That is a quieter kind of despair than Martin's, and it is more common.

Her arc is also the most honest. She does not get a miracle. She gets a small amount of help, a few friends who are not really friends, and a decision to keep going. When she considers putting Matty in a home, the novel does not treat the thought as a betrayal. It treats it as a reasonable question that a exhausted woman is allowed to ask.

The pact

They do not jump. They make a pact instead: they will stay alive until Valentine's Day, and they will help each other. Jess's condition is that they help her find her ex-boyfriend Chas. So they leave the roof, get in a taxi, and go to a party, which is where the book announces that it is going to be a comedy about depression rather than a tragedy about it.

The pact is a fragile thing, and the novel is honest about how fragile. None of them are cured. They are four strangers who have agreed to postpone a decision, and the postponement gives them a reason to keep talking. That is all. Hornby does not pretend it is therapy. He does not pretend it is friendship, at least not at first. It is a deal, and deals can be broken.

The group's first outing is a disaster in the way that most forced social occasions are disasters. They do not like each other. They judge each other. Martin is condescending. Jess is cruel. Maureen is uncomfortable. JJ is stoned. The comedy comes from the mismatch, and the pathos comes from the fact that they have no one else.

The angel

Jess tells a reporter that they saw an angel on the roof, and that the angel looked like Matt Damon. The lie is not planned. It comes out of her need to make the story mean something, and it immediately becomes a media event. The group is offered money, interviews, and a slot on Martin's old television network.

This section is the novel's sharpest satire. The press does not care whether the angel is real. It cares whether the story sells. Martin, who has been a media person his whole life, recognizes the machine and hates it, and then participates in it anyway because he wants his career back. The others go along because they are curious, or broke, or bored.

The television appearance is a disaster. Martin is humiliated. Jess admits on air that the angel was a lie. The group becomes a joke, and the joke exposes the fact that they were never a support group. They were four people with a shared secret, and the secret has been sold.

Hornby is good at this kind of social comedy. He understands the way television eats people and then asks them to thank it. He also understands that the people being eaten are often willing participants. Martin is not a victim of the media. He is a man who wants to be famous again, and the book does not let him off.

Tenerife

The middle section takes the group to Tenerife for a holiday, paid for by the newspaper money. It is a strange interlude. They lie by a pool, they drink, they fight, and they almost become friends. Jess sees a girl who looks like her sister Jen and nearly gets arrested. JJ sleeps with a woman who remembers his band. Martin leaves the hotel after a fight and spends a night alone, thinking.

That night is the book's best chapter. Martin decides that he has made no mistakes. His life has been ruined by other people: the girl, the press, his wife, the public. The rationalization is so complete and so self-serving that it becomes almost impressive. Hornby lets him have the thought without correcting it. The reader can see the delusion, and Martin cannot, and that gap is the character.

The holiday also shows how thin the group's bond is. They are not a family. They are four people who met in a crisis and have been unable to walk away. When the trip ends, they make a plan to meet again on Valentine's Day, mostly because none of them can think of anything better to do.

The roof again

They return to Toppers House on Valentine's Day. While they are talking, a young man comes onto the roof and jumps. They do not stop him. They try, but they are too far away, or too slow, or too surprised. The death is sudden and unglamorous, and it changes the tone of everything that came before.

The scene is the novel's answer to its own premise. Suicide is not a philosophical position. It is a body on the pavement. The group has spent months treating their own survival as a negotiation, and the young man's death shows them what the negotiation is actually about. They are shaken. They go home. They agree to meet again.

It is also the moment where Hornby risks sentimentality and mostly avoids it. The group does not learn a lesson. They do not decide that life is precious. They are simply frightened, and the fear is more convincing than any speech about hope. The young man is not given a backstory. He is a stranger who dies, and the strangers who live have to carry the image.

The rest of the book is aftermath. Martin tries to reconnect with his daughters and fails. Maureen considers putting Matty in a home and cannot do it. Jess keeps looking for her sister. JJ keeps delivering pizzas. None of them are fixed. The novel ends with the group still meeting, still alive, still uncertain, and the last line refuses to promise that any of them will be okay.

That refusal is the book's integrity. A lesser novel would have ended with a wedding, a baby, or a sunrise. Hornby ends with four people who have decided to keep meeting because the alternative is worse. It is not a happy ending. It is a temporary arrangement, and the book is honest enough to call it that.

What the book gets right

The rotating narration is the technical achievement. Hornby gives each character a vocabulary and a set of obsessions. Martin talks in media terms. Maureen talks in chores. Jess talks in insults. JJ talks in music references. The voices are distinct enough that you can tell who is speaking without the chapter heading, and that is harder than it looks.

The book is also honest about the boredom of depression. Maureen's chapters are full of small tasks and small humiliations. She is not crying in a corner. She is making breakfast for a grown man who cannot feed himself, and then she is going to work, and then she is doing it again. Hornby does not romanticize that life. He does not make it noble. He makes it exhausting.

The comedy is a risk that pays off. The jokes are not about suicide. They are about the absurdity of four people trying to form a social club out of a shared death wish. The humor makes the sadness bearable without denying it, and that balance is the reason the book is readable rather than grim.

What it does not

The characters are types. Martin is the narcissist, Maureen the martyr, Jess the wild child, JJ the slacker. Hornby gives each of them a backstory and a voice, but he does not give them much room to surprise you. Once you understand the type, you can predict the reaction. That is fine for comedy and limiting for a novel that wants to say something serious about depression.

The ending is a soft landing. After the young man jumps, the book has a chance to confront the fact that some people do not get saved. Instead, it pulls back into a warm group hug. The four survive, the meetings continue, and the novel avoids the harder question of whether their survival is luck, will, or something less flattering.

The women are also underserved. Maureen is written with sympathy, but she is defined almost entirely by her son. Jess is defined by her sister and her father. The men get the interiority and the jokes. That is a pattern in Hornby's work, and it is more visible here because the cast is so small.

Still, I liked it. It is a book about people who are not good at being alive, written by someone who is very good at writing about that. It does not offer a cure. It offers company, and sometimes that is the honest thing a novel can do. The last page does not tell you that everything will be fine. It tells you that four people are still talking, and that is enough for now.

FAQ

Is A Long Way Down a comedy?

It is a dark comedy. The premise is four people meeting on a roof to kill themselves, and Hornby finds humor in their mismatched personalities without making suicide the joke.

Do any of the four main characters die?

No. Martin, Maureen, Jess, and JJ all survive the book, though a young man jumps from the roof near the end and the group is shaken by it.

Who narrates A Long Way Down?

The novel rotates between four first-person narrators, Martin, Maureen, Jess, and JJ, with each chapter told by one of them.