Eleven Lines to Somewhere by Alyson Rudd

What defines a Rom-Com novel?

Whimsy.  Hard to think of an example of a dark one.  There are certainly humorous novels that qualify as existential, and there are possibly romantic novels that might be construed as dark.  But add romantic as an adjective to comedy, and lightness and frivolity are the order of the day.

A certain immaturity. A protagonist might be well into their third decade; having all the accoutrements of a grown-up life, job, mortgage, but there’ll be something unfinished about them.  

Unhappiness. A character will be somehow unaware of being miserable or, more than likely, be in denial.  They’ll be in need of someone to point all this out to them.  A job for friends and  family.

Quirky friends.  One or more, to provide a variety of offbeat situations and subplots that will involve lots of witty repartee. 

Dysfunctional family.  But in an eccentric way as opposed to full-on pathological.  They can be either in alliance with quirky friends or in conflict with them as to what’s best for the protagonist.  That conflict, often, being the family promoting the wrong romantic option.

The marriage plot. What is needed for achieving proper adulthood, and future lifelong happiness, is the right partner.  The soulmate, the one person on the planet pre-destined to complete them.

The wrong’un.  The present amour or insistent suiter, who will manifestly not provide lifelong happiness. Usually everyone but the protagonist can see this.

Meant to be.  One or both of the main characters don’t recognise that the other is the right one.  The reader does, and knows in the end the scales will fall from their eyes.  But the lack of suspense that might entail doesn’t really get in the way of the pleasures that these stories afford.  

The course of true love never runs smooth. The reader finds comedic pleasure in the convoluted situations involving misunderstandings, unfortunate coincidences and often outright myopia.   Even when those predicaments involve some kind of nastiness or grief, the overcoming of that only serves to validate the worthiness of the ‘right one’.

Eleven Lines to Somewhere fulfils many of the criteria listed above.  While not all of the Rom-Com boxes are ticked, enough are for it to qualify.

The novel, which has a contemporary setting, was written before the current Covid 19 pandemic which has upended so many things in our lives.   The various trainlines that make up the London Underground feature quite importantly and it’s a peculiar feeling for the reader to find themselves traveling along with characters blithely unconcerned with the possibility of viral transmission.

It’s also a bit like being caught up, for those familiar with it, in the Mornington Crescent game off BBC Radio 4’s, Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.

The male of our two main characters, Ryan, on the start of his usual commute, boards a Piccadilly line train at the North Ealing station and there espies Sylvia, the female half of the necessary equation.  He becomes a bit more than mildly obsessed with her, in the way of people who run personal ads along the lines of “To the tall blonde guy wearing a green overcoat on Number 6 bus last Tuesday, our eyes met but I didn’t get the chance to say hello.  Would love to meet up. Contact…”

Ryan doesn’t do that (do those ads ever work?), instead he spends months with the occasional sighting of Sylvia again on the Underground and trying to figure out how to actually speak to her.  This is classic Rom-Com stuff, taking up almost the first half of the book, and is the best part of this novel.

Which is fine, as we have come to like Ryan and Sylvia, and want to continue along with them, as they resolve the issues their respective troubled pasts, on the way to the inevitably happy ending.  There are also the twists and turns of the various Rom-Com subplots involving friends and relations to keep us engaged and the pages turning. 

Eleven Lines to Somewhere is certainly a change from Alyson Rudd’s first novel, The First Time Lauren Pailing Died. That book, while possessing a domestic, and at times whimsical, tone, had more of a Sci-Fi Stephen King-ish feel, involving as it did, alternative realities.

Eleven Lines to Somewhere to be published 23 July 2020