This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Thirty-one years ago this summer, Four Weddings and A Funeral came out and the full horror of British marriages was revealed to the world. The peculiar dress code, the bumbling vicar, the interminable speeches, the enforced small talk, the grotesquery of the seating plan, the awful spectre of the dancefloor and the endless, endless drinking. The film’s funeral looked much more straightforward, practically jollier, in comparison.
Here’s the contemporary version: a big, fat, Oxbridge wedding in the South of France, which involves several events across four days. It’s not solely a British affair. One of the grooms is American, so there’s a softball game before the wedding and plenty of American guests, but the trademark elements of a modern destination wedding in Europe are there: expensive hotel; long, painstaking itinerary detailing when guests have to be where; sweltering ceremony at an old chateau; disastrous brunch the following day; endless, endless drinking, as per, along with the odd bag of cocaine.
Against this backdrop, Francesca Hornak examines the rivalries and schisms running between the group of Oxford friends. What could possibly go wrong?
One of the gang is a trustafarian who’s used family dosh to set up a successful film company; another is still in love with him; another is still in love with her; another is an actor who’s made it big in a supernatural wolf series and is living in LA but still smarts from the trustafarian’s nickname for him (“Pikey”), plus the fact that Serge — the spoiled rich Sebastian Flyte to the actor’s Charles Ryder — nicked the idea they worked on at Oxford together and made it big without him. Another of the group, Caspar, is the gay groom getting married. A merry bunch.
Chapters are broken down into chronological snapshots of the event, interspersed with the occasional flashback to Oxford from varying characters’ views. So we move from 7pm at the rehearsal dinner in a Luberon vineyard, for example, to 9am in one of their hotel rooms the following morning, to the dancefloor at 10.40pm on the wedding night itself.
We all have a front seat at this wedding, alongside the guests. You’ll wince with recognition at Hornak’s sharp observations of weddings but also of humans. She’s brilliant at honing in on every individual’s unhappiness, so you feel sympathy for them even if they are a spoiled and lucky lot, which is the same trick they pulled off so adeptly in Succession.
Trustafarian Serge is entitled and arrogant, but his relationship — once so glorious and hopeful — is floundering, and he’s the subject of a brutal online pile-on. Daniel, the celebrity actor, is pleased with himself and judgemental of others but still feels as if he’s not good enough amongst the Oxford gang because he had a less gilded upbringing. Isla, a mother of young twins, is bad-tempered, tired and neurotic about her children. She wonders, too, what’s happened to the dizzying, all-encompassing love that she once felt for her partner.
Funny moments break up the characters’ more introspective mooning. A platter of kedgeree is flung into the swimming pool. At the reception, after one character has a bloody accident and another takes to the dancefloor mic to ask if there’s a doctor in the house, nobody responds. “But if we’d been like, ‘Is there a minor royal in the building?’ we’d have been fine,” one character remarks wryly.
The plotting is also neat — a pair of cufflinks which have been in the wrong hands for 20 years cause suspicions of an affair, and a misconstrued teenage flirtation has altered the course of one character’s life, entirely unbeknownst to him.
There’s a Sliding Doors element to the novel which feels very familiar — if only we’d chosen differently back then, would we be better off now? There’s also an agonising accident regarding social media, the equivalent of mistakenly sending a rude email about someone to that very person, which feels entirely possible. Don’t drink and post, kids.
As something of a wedding war horse myself, and having gone to many (most?) of them as a single woman in my 30s, I felt acutely the anxieties of Rosie, the 35-year-old spinster who’s wondering whether she’ll ever walk down an aisle whilst worrying that she’s missed her chance to have babies. Don’t worry, Rosie, I felt like telling her, as I’ve consoled myself from time to time before, sitting in a hot church ceremony — the divorces will start soon.
So Good to See You is compulsive and highly entertaining — although I wouldn’t hurry to read it if you’re off to a wedding in Provence this summer. It’ll only make you wonder why on earth you’ve spent £500 on an EasyJet flight … and that’s before you even get to the hotel bill.
