About a Boy

The diverse, metropolitan city of London is a constant motif in About a Boy, as are the interactions of the novel’s middle-class characters with the populace. Most of the book’s action concentrates in North London, spanning the working-class Holloway Road; middle-class, arty, Camden Lock and Upper Street; and a single foray into Regent’s Park. The named characters who inhabit these zones are white and middle class. However, Hornby’s writing shows an awareness of a larger, more diverse population, which elicits a sense of curiosity and anxiety in the middle-class characters.

The characters rub shoulders with less privileged Londoners in public zones, such as the hospital waiting room while Fiona is being treated. Marcus and Will notice that “more or less everyone in the waiting room was some kind of deadbeat—a vagrant, or a drunk, or a junkie, or just mad” (61). Will considers that these patients “had simply transferred the chaos of daily life from one place to another. It made no difference to them if they were roaring at passers-by in the street or abusing nurses in a hospital casualty department” (61). Marcus worries that because his mother took drugs, she too will be considered a junkie and that no one will know “the difference” between her and the poorer and less educated wasters (62). However, the difference that “separated Fiona from the rest of them” is the middle-class people waiting for her, with attributes such as “Suzie’s reassuring car keys and Will’s expensive casual clothes” (62).

While Marcus worries that his mother has gone the same way as the down-and-outs, Will retreats into his private world of the expensive consumer goods that separate him from feeling the same despair desperation as people in the waiting room. Here, Hornby displays his characters’ class anxieties and their desire to separate themselves and believe they are better than the most vulnerable members of the population. Although Will is the character who invents the concept of a personal bubble, a frightened Marcus experiences his own desire for one that will surround and protect Fiona.

Later, Marcus fixates on the differences between him and other delinquents when he cuts school following his meeting with the headmistress. He concludes that the career of serial truants must have begun with a single walk-out too. Prior to being so frustrated by Mrs. Morrison that he ran out of school, Marcus had “always presumed that truants were different sort of people entirely, not like him at all, that they’d been born truants” (140). He is awed and frightened by how much he has changed since moving to London; six months earlier, “he wasn’t a truant kind of person whatsoever” (140).

Marcus therefore begins to understand that people are not static and can, in fact, change according to circumstance. This gives him a more realistic perception of humanity, as he learns that a few significant acts can make the difference between his law-abiding middle class privilege and the undesirables cast outs who society deems too dangerous or poor. However, at the end of the novel, when Marcus sees the idea of change as a good thing, he finds hope and opportunity in the idea of chaotic, metropolitan London “where people came at each other from all sorts of odd angles” (271). He knows that he can be part of this irregular scene and has less desire to protect himself from it.