“Some dead people who were too sensitive to live: Sylvia Plath, van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, Primo Levi, Kurt Cobain, of course. Some alive people: George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Osama bin Laden. - JJ”
Four disparate people find themselves one New Year’s Eve on Topper’s House with a common purpose: jump off from the building and put an end to what they perceive to be their respective miserable lives.
Martin Sharp was a morning television show host until he was sent to prison for sleeping with a minor. When he completed his jail time, he found his seemingly perfect life gone. No career, no wife, no daughters. He does not believe that people who take their own lives do so while the balance of their minds is disturbed. Rather, he thinks coroners’ reports should read that people take their lives “after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.”
Maureen is a 51-year old single mother tired of caring full-time for a physically and mentally incapacitated son. She can’t get used to the idea that her life is “finished, pointless, too hard, and completely without hope or color.”
Jess Crichton is an 18-year old kid who has difficulty talking to her parents. Her sister has suddenly disappeared and her boyfriend has as swiftly left her without an explanation. She can’t imagine herself waking up in the morning and she realizes that the best thing to do was to make her life as short as she possibly could. At that point, she “could feel the weight of everything – the weight of loneliness, of everything that had gone wrong.”
JJ is an American come to London who had big dreams of becoming rich and famous. His girlfriend has recently dumped him. His band, which he thought was to going to become his ticket to fame and fortune, has split up. He thinks that “suicide is supposed to be cool. It was invented for Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake”. And for JJ. He was disappointed to see that Martin, Maureen, and Jess, clearly uncool people, also wanted to jump off Topper’s House.
A Long Way Down explores the nuances of suicide in a half humorous, half contemplative manner. As Topper’s House Four (how JJ refers to the four of them) moves from 30 minutes to one year of holding off their plan to end their lives, we see that life, while it might not necessarily become better, becomes more bearable with a little help and company from friends. While we may think that it will take a happening of cosmic proportions to convince some people that life is still worth living, sometimes it only takes something simple to achieve the same. As mundane as a vacation, a ticket to a game show, or a part-time job.
Hornby is adept at keeping the four voice of Martin, Maureen, Jess, and JJ distinct and reverberating. The book has managed to put together a sensitive topic that is funny, poignant, and profound all at the same time.
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