By Calum Nicholson, UK Correspondent
The prolific blogger and former Russian airline executive D.M. Cummings famously broke into fiction with his 2016 conspiracy thriller Let’s Leave!, which became a bestseller and publishing phenomenon in the UK, following a scrappy marketing campaign that went unexpectedly viral.
It’s a tale that itself hardly needs recounting. A born storyteller, in Let’s Leave! Cummings spun a yarn that captured the public imagination. Its boldly drawn fantasy world quickly became as much a part of the fabric of the culture of the late 2010s as Harry Potter had been in the late 2000s.
In a December 2019 poll, 44% of Brits voted it their favourite novel. But much like the 1997 film Titanic — to which its plot has famously been compared — it was a work that, while read by many, was still hated by most. In the same poll, 54% voted it their least favourite novel.
Four years later, Cummings has published his next work of fiction. Called There and Back Again: Vol 1 — a title that teases the thrilling possibility of future instalments — the novel tells the story of a special advisor to the Prime Minister during a global pandemic, who is forced to relocate his family to rural County Durham to protect them from neighbourhood side-eye, and the occasional question from a free press.
Given the famously cocky and confident style of his first novel, the tone of this new work is surprisingly hesitant and subdued, perhaps reflecting the circumstances under which it was written.
I meet Cummings in the living room of Chillingham Castle, where his in-laws have lived for 400 years. He speaks in a low, measured tone, at odds with his brash reputation, as he reflects on writing the book.
’The truth is, when I wrote Leave, I believed in the characters, and the themes I was working with. I’d been thinking about it all for years. But with this story, to be blunt, my publisher gave me no option, and my heart wasn’t really in it. And I had a tight deadline, and just didn’t have enough time to work out all the details of the plot. I never even really understood my own character’s motivations.’
The author’s indifference comes through in the text, which is riddled with plot holes, and held together by wild contrivances and unlikely scenarios, in the effort to get the characters from point A to B, to Barnard Castle, and back again.
For example, the plot is set in motion through a need to find childcare when the advisor and his wife believe they have contracted the virus. Despite having family in London, and his closest aide living two streets over, they decide on a two hundred and sixty mile drive to County Durham.
However, it had already been established – in a prologue in which none other than the hero had instructed the Prime Minister (thinly written as comic relief) on the rules for ‘lockdown’ in the face of the pandemic — that travel while infected was prohibited. The contradiction is stark, and the lazy plotting breaks the spell.
Once in Durham, there is then a meandering subplot in which the story sags, as the advisor drives his wife and child on a seventy-mile round trip to Barnard Castle. Although the date of travel is his wife’s birthday, for some reason Cummings is at pains to emphasise that this journey was made to test the hero’s eyesight, in preparation for the long drive back to London.
Putting aside the sheer oddness of this as an eye-testing technique, and the fact that in doing he would be breaking the law, there is also a gaping plot hole: it had already been made clear that his wife could drive.
This gets to perhaps the most troubling aspect of There and Back Again – the treatment of women. Throughout the story, they are portrayed as silent and powerless, passive bystanders and literal passengers to the central narrative, which remains squarely centred on the hero. One is left with the sense that, like the child, they serve merely as a plot device.
I asked Mr Cummings about what unites his two very different books. ‘I think the theme of wanting to just fuck off, you know? Of setting out on one’s own – and damn the consequences…of making it up as you go along’.
He smiles sheepishly. ‘A bit meta, I know’.
Cummings drains his carrot juice, and stretches in his wingback chair. ‘I think the thing is, my characters just never want to remain where they are. It doesn’t matter what they have access to in doing so — the clout of the greatest economic union on earth; the childcare resources of the greatest city on earth — they always want to be elsewhere. They just want to leave.’
He furrows his brow, and for a few second stares thoughtfully out the window at the well-tended grounds of his in-laws’ estate. ‘And they never think the normal rules apply to people like them’. He looks back at me, and beams.
There and Back Again is an odd book, marked by a strange dissonance of tone. It is set against the tragedy of a global pandemic, yet it seems to attempt comedy. At times, it feels like a knowing farce. But most of the time, it simply reads for what it is: a poor outing by a bestselling author with a loyal readership. It’s a story written to reward the author, and their publisher, not the close reader.
Grade: 1/5 Stars
Calum Nicholson is UK Correspondent for The Economic Standard. @CTMNicholson
