The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan

Meet the wedding party.

THE BRIDE AND GROOM: Celine and Luke are meant to get married and live happily ever after. But Celine’s more interested in playing the piano, and Luke’s a serial cheater.

THE BRIDESMAID: Phoebe, Celine’s sister, is meant to finish college and get a real job. Instead she pulls pints, lives with six flatmates, and has no long-term aspirations beyond smoking her millionth cigarette.

THE BEST MAN: Archie, Luke’s best friend and ex-boyfriend, is meant to move up the corporate ladder and on from Luke. Yet he stands where he is, admiring the view.

THE GUEST: Vivian, Luke’s other best friend and other ex, was meant to put up with Luke’s bullshit when they dated. But she didn’t. And now she is contented, methodically observing her friends like ants.

As the wedding approaches and these five lives intersect, each character will find themselves looking for a path to their happily ever after – but does it lie at the end of an aisle?

My briefest summary of The Happy Couple would be that it exemplifies the potentially disastrous consequences of not communicating properly with people around you and not truly listening to yourself.

The Happy Couple is split into five parts, portraying a different character’s perspective in each part as we move closer towards the wedding. The characters reflect on how they met each other, how Luke and Celine got together, the impressions of their relationship… it’s all very articulate and self-aware. Apart from when they are interacting with each other out loud.

All of the characters have some serious flaws. Celine is an example of someone who has settled simply because she fears insecurity or instability. Luke is not really interested in her, and frankly she is not really interested in Luke either. He treats her badly – for example doing a vanishing act at their engagement party for his own unexpressed reasons – and it is clear that she does not have the self-respect to kick up a fuss about this with him. The effect of this is that she feels unappreciated but pushes away her feelings in favour of the promise of stability, and she enables Luke to walk all over her because he knows that she will not address his faults with him.

Archie and Phoebe are both loose cannons. Archie has the semblance of being a “proper adult”, as he is a corporate lawyer working very long hours, but he spends the little free time he has tracking down his next stash of cocaine. Phoebe is resistant to doing anything that other people think she should do, such as finishing her education or getting on the career ladder – although this independence of thought is a welcome contrast to Celine’s self-imposed constraints.

I would say that Vivian is the only voice of reason in the book. She is able to see the situation for what it is and discuss it with Luke, although I did feel that she had the means to do this far earlier than she does. The fact that she was such a reasonable presence was actually quite jarring and I found myself wondering why she hadn’t abandoned this oblivious group years ago for more mature friends.

The common theme throughout The Happy Couple is communication – the absence of it or the inability to do so properly. The characters seem incapable of saying how they really feel and they put on a perpetual act to seem “normal” on the outside. Scratching the surface, this inability or unwillingness to communicate is at times because the characters do not feel entitled to feel how they feel (Celine) and in other instances because they don’t know how to express how they feel (Luke and Archie). They each seem aware of this within themselves but are incapable of expressing it out loud.

The Happy Couple is an interesting character study. But it’s chaos. It was hard to believe the characters are nearly all supposed to be in their mid-to-late twenties and in particular I constantly found myself thinking that Luke, and to a lesser extent Celine, were nowhere near mature enough to get married. And their friends aren’t mature enough to be helping them towards their marriage.

This is an easy read – I read it in a day. Dolan is clearly very self-aware herself which is translated to some (but not all) of the characters’ inner thoughts. But honestly, I can’t decide if I liked the book or not. I just had no respect for any of the characters and I felt that the writing – whilst quite good –didn’t quite make up for the frustrating plot.