Come again by Robert Webb

Times literary supplement 8 May 2020

The comedian and actor Robert Webb has followed his well-received memoir How Not to Be a Boy (TLS, September 15, 2017) with a time-travelling novel, Come Again. Webb’s heroine is the forty-five-year-old Kate Marsden, an IT specialist whose husband has recently dropped dead from a brain tumour. Kate is plunged into overwhelming grief, and Webb is very good on her anger at those friends who wish to pull her out of it. She rails against anything that might cheer her up, not least “Lunch. Fuck off, lunch”.

Webb also makes a good attempt to inhabit a woman’s body, neither over-eroticizing his heroine nor exaggerating her basic bodily functions in an effort to make them sound authentic. Kate also reveals the mystery behind so-called women’s intuition, saying, “I call it paying attention. Women are interested in how funny men’s minds work because we might need that knowledge to survive. So we end up anticipating things and it looks like a magic trick”.

Kate finds herself – literally – transported back twenty-eight years to 1992, when she first met her husband Luke at university; she must seduce him again and also save him from his incipient brain tumour. The wryness Webb displays here and elsewhere is somewhat marred by his tendency to crowbar his own societal prejudices into the narrative, as well as by his cheap tricks of hindsight. In one of the scenes when Kate goes back in time, she has a conversation with her taxi-driving father Bill:

“The royals could do with a black princess. I think that would be cool.” Bill gave a chuckle. “Cool for you, maybe. Blimey, can you imagine what the Daily Mail would do to her?”

Later, Kate wonders of Boris Johnson, “if she had been sent back in time to strangle the lying bastard”.

Thankfully, Webb does have something to say about second chances, which rescues the novel somewhat, not least from Kate’s internal monologue at the novel’s wearying crescendo: “You’re not Carrie Bradshaw, you’re Boudicca. But didn’t Boudicca get horny? Of course she did. You can be Carrie AND Boudicca!”

This review first appeared in the The Times Literary Supplement