Books like Whatever Love Means

When the first line of a book is grammatically incorrect, and therefore doesn’t actually make sense, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the book, but I thought I’d persevere and see if David could redeem himself. Well, I certainly can’t say the writing left me ‘in awe’ - as said the review blurb on the front from the Sunday Times, but the story itself was pretty amusing and it kept me turning the pages. It’s predominantly about a group of four people – two male friends from Uni days and their partners. There is Vic who is a carefree session musician who is having an affair with his best friend’s wife, despite having his own girlfriend Tess. Vic is not a particularly likeable character with his non committal, impulsive and thoughtless ways. I love the line where Joe describes him as 'a man whose sense of social responsibility is exhausted by pulling over to let an ambulance by'. Joe is the wronged best friend, a conservative and gentle biochemist whose big career aim in life is to find a cure for AIDS. He lives a pretty uneventful, but relatively happy, home life with Emma and their son Jackson.Emma comes across as a fairly weak person – well I suppose she would as we know she is having an affair from the outset, but she is also dealing with the stresses and strains of the baby, as well as her mum who is suffering from Alzhiemer’s. We are later to find out that there is a whole lot more to add to her troubles.Tess is a bit of a sub character, Vic’s girlfriend, a successful career woman (she is a wine taster and merchant) who also appears a strong character in her relationships, in fact the only kind that could put up with Vic.The affair between Vic and Emma begins the day of the death of Diana – hence the awful first line of ‘Vic f**ked her first the day Princess Dianna died.’ Was he in a queue?! While this massive public tragedy unfolds so does the private one of these two couples and their entwined relationships. Vic begins to experience new feelings, actually thinking he may love Emma, Joe struggles fruitlessly to keep their marriage together and ends up having a one night stand with Tess, who is also suspecting her boyfriend’s infidelities. This ONS tragically occurs on the eve of the death of Emma in a car crash. As Joe then struggles to work out what happened to Emma, he begins to uncover the fact that she was suffering from a brain tumour. Then we are in for some big twists and turns and it all gets a little fast paced and far fetched. It turns out the promiscuous Vic, who always thought HIV was ‘a gay thing’, is actually carrying AIDS which he then passed onto Emma, this then being the reason her tumour had advanced so aggressively. I feel Baddiel is trying to make some moral points and gets a bit carried away at the end, losing a bit of his dry and witty ability for good storytelling.You can tell the novel is written by a comedian with its humour happy to be made through un-PC and awkward subjects. He is also a really good story teller with great observation but his writing really isn’t up to scratch. Couldn’t he afford a decent editor? That may have turned things around a fair bit.I can’t really see any excuse for a badly edited book. Some people may have a great story to tell but not be the greatest writer, that’s why there is always someone out there to sort that out, however, if you are someone who can excuse this then I wouldn’t totally dismiss this book. It’s an insightful and funny quick read but just not worthy of a long-term place on my bookshelf.