After You takes up where Me Before You left off, with the heroine Louisa Clark living in the fallout of Will Traynor’s assisted suicide. A philanderer before a road accident paralysed him from the neck downwards, Will had resolved to end his life using Dignitas’s services, before meeting Louisa. As the caregiver who fell for her charge in Me Before You, Louisa changed Will — but ultimately not enough for him to reverse his decision.

With the appearance of the sequel to Me Before You coinciding with its Hollywood adaptation, Jojo Moyes has been very much in the news, complete with her own Twitter controversy led by disability rights campaigners enraged at what they view as a stifling representation of disability. (Activists mocked the film’s attempt to use paraplegics as ‘inspiration porn’.) Despite all this hullaballoo, and the crushing weight of expectations that accompany a sequel, Moyes does a fine job and After You is a story that stands on its own.

Lou is living in London, in the apartment she bought with the bequest from Will’s death, stuck in a waitressing job at an airport bar. She is swamped with grief and guilt, and freely ‘talks’ to Will while going about her life. For a while, After You seems like a terrible idea with its romantic hangover and a maudlin montage of Louisa reliving better times and imputing Will with the prescient knowledge it is so easy to attribute to the dead who won’t contradict you. But Moyes is an expert at escalating things, and by the end of the very first chapter, Lou has — accidentally, though no one will believe her — fallen off the top of a building, a literal evocation of the emotional effect that Will’s death has had on her.

Jojo Moyes tells a tale of how, instead of resolving into neat conclusions, life can have jagged endings

What she finds when she lands is that she still does have the will (no pun intended) to live. Lou climbs her way out of her emotional hovel, picking up the pieces of her battered body, finding her way back into the bosom of her family who had disapproved of her role in Will’s euthanasia, and facing up to the cruel gossip of their neighbours in her hometown of Strotfold.

Moyes’s description of a working-class Brit family, and its idiosyncratic members — Grandpa and Lou’s sister Treena in particular are vividly evoked — is splendid. Lou’s mum’s discovery of feminism is trenchant and funny, inducing belly laughs while exposing our own hypocrisy. In one scene, as Lou expertly quashes her guilt while her mum does the dishes, we instantly recognise the gulf between nodding at all the feminist arguments and actually fighting a patriarchal mindset. Despite the entry of a hunky love interest, ‘Ambulance Sam’, and the contours of a new life, Lou realises that Will’s death has scarred her more than she expected and that she is missing something vital.

“That’s just a fairy tale ending, isn’t it?” she muses in the Moving On Circle, a support group for the bereaved that her father pressures her to join. “Man dies, everyone learns something, moves on, creates something wonderful out of his death. I’ve done none of those things. I’ve basically just failed at all of it.” And then, everything happens at once. A messed-up teenager, a waif who claims to be Will’s daughter, shows up on Lou’s doorstep. Lily brings chaos into Lou’s life: is Lou doing the right thing by helping a teenager whose own family refuses to support her? Or is her obsession with Lily symptomatic of her refusal to get past Will and forge a new life?

“It was a slightly thinned out version of the Moving On Circle that week. Natasha was on holiday, as was Jake, for which I was mostly relieved and a tiny bit put out in a way I couldn’t reconcile. The evening’s topic was ‘If I could turn back time’, which meant that William and Sunil hummed or whistled the Cher song unconsciously at intervals for the entire hour and a half. I listened to Fred wishing he had spent less time at work, then Sunil wishing he’d got to know his brother better (‘You just think they’re always going to be there, you know? And then one day they’re not’), and wondered if it really had been worth coming. There had been a couple of times when I’d thought the group might actually be helping. But for an awful lot of the time I was sitting among people I felt I had nothing in common with, droning on for the few hours they had company. I felt grumpy and tired, my hip ached on the hard plastic chair, and I thought I might have got just as much enlightenment about my mental state if I had been watching EastEnders. Plus the biscuits were rubbish. Leanne, a single mother, was talking about how she and her elder sister had argued about a pair of tracksuit bottoms two days before her sister had died. ‘I accused her of taking them, because she was always nicking my stuff. She said she hadn’t, but then she always said she hadn’t.’ Marc waited. I wondered if I had any painkillers in my handbag.” — Excerpt from the book

To make a 16-year-old Lily no one had ever heard of slightly believable, Moyes has to create a demonic mother. Tanya Houghton-Miller is thin, blond and privileged, all of which is held against her. She is a woman so vengeful that, spurned by Will, she simply omits to tell him that he has a daughter; a mother so spiteful she has the locks in her home changed to keep her daughter out. She is a stock villain, deprived of nuances, and not redeemed by any delayed revelations. Dismissing Lou’s suggestion that Will may have changed his mind about ending his life had he known about his daughter, Tanya exclaims, “I am not going to be made to feel responsible for that man’s suicide. You think my life isn’t complicated enough? Don’t you dare come here judging me.” But we never do get a glimpse into her ‘complications’.

Unfortunately, it’s not just Tanya who is a cardboard cutout. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the too-good-to-be-true Ambulance Sam, the paramedic who saves Lou when she falls and hangs around while she heals. Sam is a legitimate female fantasy, albeit a lower-middle class one. Even from the depths of her despair, Lou notes his “capable hands” and “kind eyes”, and the life-and- death nature of his line of work provides the adrenalin surge that propels their romance. Going by the personal revelations of those in the Moving On Circle, Sam is a compulsive womaniser, but we recognise this to be a minor obstacle surmounted in time, in the typical conventions of this genre.

What gives After You its particular appeal is its ambivalence about the choices one must make, in a way that feels true to life. “You know what makes me feel down?” Treena scolds Lou. “The way you keep promising to live some kind of a life, then sacrifice yourself to every waif and stray who come across your path.” Is it right of Lou to take in Lily? We are just as much in the dark as she herself, and Sam provides a robust counterpoint to Treena’s argument when he notes that he sees too many smashed-up teenagers because people decided to follow their own dreams instead of stopping for someone else. With an opportunity of a lifetime pulling her in a direction opposite both Lily and Sam, Lou’s messy, chaotic life is as bereft of neat endings as yours or mine. And it is this perpetual tightrope walk, incapable of being righted simply by bold decisions or black-and- white choices, which makes Moyes’s fiction compelling to her fans.

The reviewer is a Karachi-based freelance writer and critic.

After You
(CHICK-LIT)
By Jojo Moyes
Pamela Dorman Books, US
ISBN: 978-0525426592
368pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 7th, 2016