Novel: What Happens Now by Jeremy Dyson (2006)

Despite picking this up when it came out, it has taken me a while to get round to reading Jeremy Dyson’s debut novel. Best known as the silent partner in the League of Gentlemen team, Dyson has been building a strong reputation as a quality writer of dark material. 

There something about the format and stylistic choices with this novel – the playing about with our perception of time – that reminds me of the underrated 3rd television series of the League or Dyson’s co-written BBC drama Funland. A choice which might sit uneasily with some readers, potentially confusing or frustrating, but which makes complete sense in the end.

There’s only so much about the plot that I can say without giving away huge elements of the plotline. The blurb on the back of the book suggests that a dark event 20 years in the past of our characters reverberates on the present lives and isn’t finished with them yet. That knowledge (which isn’t neccessarily obvious from the text whilst reading the story) rather hangs over the narrative and leaves us wondering about the inevitable outcome.

What Happens Now tells the story of young Alistair Black from Leeds who is picked out for stardom and a part in a television series in the early 1980s called Then and Now. On set he befriends Alice Zealand – a girl he falls in love with, and London lad Steve Raw. Together they show Alistair something of the world outside of his bedroom and imagination.

Then and Now is a show which portrays historical stories and events in a Then episode, contrasted against a contemporary Now episode on tv each week. Alistair is recruited with the others to portray  the story of an Anne Frank character and her family as they hide beneath a restaurant during the war in a hope to escape the NAZIs. 

By alternating chapters in the book between the events of the making of the programme in the 1980s, and Alice’ and Alistair’s lives today (well, 2001) Dyson allows the book essentially to follow the format of the fictional tv series. The past and its allusions to the war, racism, misunderstanding and isolation is mirrored in the present and it is clear that the past is still being felt. But we aren’t sure how – Alistair is on a train in a foreign land and Alice has been on retreat to Israel and is facing up to her ex-boyfriend she ran out on. What happened to send them off on these lonely pilgrimages?

Both stories (then and now) play out simultaneously, and we can’t really understand one without the other. The Alice and Alistair of the present are slightly fucked up individuals, with emotional issues, but it is the Alice and Alistair of 20 years previous that are of most interest. Carefully drawn studies of two teenagers growing up. I found myself identifying with aspects of both stories, and elements of both characters and this surely is exactly what a writer hopes to achieve in his audience. Alistair’s withdrawal, shyness and relative pureity allows us to see the world through his frightened eyes and to be affected by moments which might otherwise pass us by.

Dyson’s debut novel is inventive and speaks of youth with affection and regret. He builds to an almighty finale that should be obvious from the opening but somehow remains hidden behind the complexities of the past.

What Happens Now

by Jeremy Dyson

published 2006 by Abacus.

Buy What Happens Now here.