To Be or Not to Be
Though ostensibly a comedy or sorts, Nick Horby's High Fidelity can just as easily be read as a grim testament to the existential crisis besetting many a middle aged Westerer in the modern age. Rob Fleming is Hornby's thirty-five year old everyman who sees himself as a mediocre failure in most of his life's accomplishments.
Serious Themes, Powerful Language
A series of clumsy romances throughout his teens, twenties, and early thirties culminate in the loss of the one person he truly loves: Laura Lydon. And while Hornby's novel is of the increasingly rare breed where the jokes are actually funny and the author's wit is never forced, he spends equal time meditating on serious themes with his powerful command of language. Throughout many chapters, Rob takes on the role of a twentieth-century Hamlet as he wonders why he goes on living when nothing seems to make him content anymore; though he often adopts the resigned outlook that led to his unhappiness in the first place: "If people have to die, I don't want them dying near me. My mum and dad won't die near me. I've made bloody sure of that. When they do, I'll hardly feel a thing."
Few things are permanent
While Rob and Laura reunite at the novel's close, nothing is certain as they move back in together. Neither one is absolutely committed to the other, yet through Horby's astonishing insights into the vagaries of romance, we realize that perhaps our own relationships were never so secure as we imagined them either; that maybe security leads to the anxiety and bordom that caused Rob to cheat on Laura in the first place, that flux and the unknown are the real context in which meaningful attraction is born.
Self-discovery in the desert
Though a completely different work of fiction, Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky addresses many of the questions that Nick Horby would raise nearly a half-century later in High Fidelity. Port and Kit Moresby are two Americans who, along with their friend George Tunner, have voyaged to North Africa to rediscover themselves. What is remarkable about Bowles' characterers, particularly Port and Kit, is that they feel so real. Just like in Hornby's story, forced dialogue and bubbly love scenes are thankfully absent. Instead we are greeted with beautifully crafted episodes of quietude in which the troubled couple share their deepest anxieties against the serene backdrop of the fading desert light.
Staring into the abyss
Port is possessed by a profound sadness that fills his entire being, and the opening pages of the book convey this masterfully: as he wakes at midday, alone in his bed, Bowles writes, "He was somewhere, he had come back through vast regions from nowhere; there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness was reassuring, because it alone was familiar." Kit, though Port's wife, cheats on him with her crass friend, Tunner, only days after Port sneaks away in the night to sleep with a local girl in a remote desert camp. Yet like in Hornby's novel the two lovers' bond lies not in their fidelity or heartfelt promises, but in the tenuous fabric of their shared existential worldviews; both Port and Kit are terrified of death, of loss, of the unknown,and neither can take solace in the other's banal reflections and empty attempts to philosophize, especially Kit. What unites them is similar to Rob and Laura's capricious attraction: a love born out of circumstances which were less than perfect, held together by the two's fragile wish to find happiness in each other in a world devoid of meaning.
References:
Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. Vintage International, 1990. ISBN: 0880015829
Hornby, Nick. High Fidelity. Riverhead Books, 1995. ISBN: 1594481784
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