I Did a Bad Thing (Linda Green)*****

I’ve read so many books where the heroine leaves her lovely, gorgeous boyfriend for a man who is stronger, more sure of himself, more flirtatious, and with a greater capacity to sweep the heroine off her feet. I usually find this very annoying because for me there’s nothing sexier than a wet drip. Miserable, nervous, pathetic teacher Jonathan is just my type. He’s even got one of my favourite boys’ names. So, watching his partner Sarah being seduced slowly but surely by the sexy, superconfident, highly competent Nick really should have been horrifically annoying.

But it wasn’t. I love Jonathan to bits, and I’d personally choose him over Nick any day. But the fact that Sarah clearly preferred Nick didn’t bother me at all.

Why? Because Sarah and Nick are so ideally suited. She and Jonathan got on well enough, but there’s no real sense of intimacy between them. They seem to love each other, but they’re more like mother and son than lovers. There’s so much chemistry between Sarah and Nick, it’s amazing they didn’t electrocute the whole office.

The book tells two parallel stories about Sarah and Nick, one taking place in the present, and one taking place several years before when they first met. In the earlier story, Nick has a girlfriend: the beautiful, glamorous, bitchy and stuck-up Amanda. In the second story, there’s Jonathan. It has to be said, Linda Green hasn’t written the most original story in the world. But hers stands out. She has a central couple who are great together, and a pair of obstacles, Jonathan and Amanda, who would obviously be so much happier with different people. (Green avoids the cliché of fixing them up: it would have been quite funny, but too neat and perfect an ending.) And, while Sarah and Nick might be perfect for each other, Green doesn’t pretend they’re perfect in any other way.

The two stories of Sarah and Nick’s relationship are really interesting, moving stories, but the one problem with this book is that the stories are almost the same. Both are set in newspaper offices, and it’s not much of a contrast that, in the earlier story, it is Nick with the senior position and the relationship, and their roles are reversed in the later story. It also doesn’t help much that they have different colleagues. Even though Green has again created some wonderful characters – particularly motherly Joan, who belongs in the earlier story – there’s not really anything specific about them that helps you to remember that they belong in one story and not the other. The only character who has really undergone a huge change is Colin: a politician (but a really lovely one) in the first story, and homeless in the second.

The stories are told pretty much in alternate chapters, moving between the past and the present. Green has attempted to create a different feel by writing the first story in the present tense. This is uses effectively to create a greater immediacy, and is presumably used to show Sarah’s more impulsive, idealistic nature when she was younger, landing her dream job and falls in love with her boss. The second story is in the past tense, which perhaps helps to indicate the restraint in both their characters when they meet again.

But, when I was reading it, I found it really confusing to have the story set in the present told in the past tense, and the story set in the past in the present tense. The font was the same throughout, so there were no visual clues. I sometimes forgot which part of the story I was in, or I got confused and thought it was one when it was actually the other.

I did wonder when I was reading the story whether it would not have been simpler if the book had been in two parts, with the past first and then the present. But it wouldn’t have been as exciting if Green had told the story in that way. It is very tense, jumping from the past to the present, and having no idea how things went wrong for Colin; why Nick didn’t just dump Amanda for Sarah (which I’m sure he’d have done in the most sensitive possible way); why Sarah didn’t want to stay in contact with Nick, when they obviously had a very strong friendship.

I Did a Bad Thing is not be the most original, the cleverest or most beautifully-written book on this blog. But Green has taken a well-known plot and made it warm, funny, involving, and somehow just what this sort of book should be. And that’s something too many published authors can’t do.