Synopsis: One May evening in London, Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, is feeling good about the future as he sits down for a meal at a little Italian bistro. He strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterward. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents, through which Adam loses everything—home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, cell phone—never to get them back.
The police are searching for him. There is a reward for his capture. A hired killer is stalking him. He is alone and anonymous in a huge, pitiless modern city. Adam has nowhere to go but down—underground. He decides to join that vast army of the disappeared and the missing who throng London’s lowest levels as he tries to figure out what to do with his life and struggles to understand the forces that have made it unravel so spectacularly. Adam’s quest will take him all along the river Thames, from affluent Chelsea to the gritty East End, and on the way he will encounter all manner of London’s denizens—aristocrats, prostitutes, evangelists, and policewomen—and version after new version of himself.
I decided to make this my second Boyd novel partly because I really enjoyed the first (Restless) and partly because this one seems to polarize people into two camps; liked it and hated it. I didn’t see many reviews claiming to love it though, so maybe I was better forewarned than I thought. Although I did find it interesting and finished it without too much effort, it lacks focus and has a lot of people doing stupid things. Maybe it’s in the water, but no one seemed to act rationally. Maybe that’s the experimental piece of what Boyd seemed to be doing with this book; to write a thriller full of people doing the unexpected. Sort of an anti-thriller; the thriller that didn’t thrill.
Not only does Adam do dumb stuff, but so does the supporting cast; Rita, Ingram and Jonjo. Each in their own ways of course, but their actions don’t follow what we’ve come to think of as normal for this type of book. Does it succeed? I don’t know. As a meandering story of what if, yes it does. What if a guy stumbled into a murder and became the chief suspect, would he run far away or hide in a vacant piece of land a few miles from the kill site and become a bum? Would a by-the-book cop jump into a relationship with a man far below her social station who appears to have been dropped into his current life straight from the moon? Would a killer-for-hire hold such a grudge against a person who doesn’t matter anymore? Would a powerful corporate executive spend so much time deciding what to drink, whether or not to wear underwear and with hookers instead of controlling his company, employees and board members? It’s as if Boyd made a bet with someone that he couldn’t sell a book with people making such weird decisions. I guess the joke’s on us.
That said, I didn’t hate it. I actually enjoyed Adam’s moral flaying. I enjoyed seeing how low he could go, from taking advantage of a relatively stupid single mother, adopting another person’s newly acquired persona, to stealing a blind man’s cane and pretending to be blind, to murdering his blackmailer. Maybe those last two should be in reverse order. Even as Adam acknowledges the slimy, lowness of his deeds he goes through with each of them without a qualm. Like the sexual encounter that ended his marriage, he seems to do these things accidentally on-purpose and it spoke to my inner voyeur.
The tracks involving the other characters were less interesting. Rita being the least among them. I never really ‘got’ her. She seemed like a bimbo add on, but those aren’t popular so was changed into a career girl and a cop. Ah that will make the PC Police back down. Eh. Then Jonjo (what a name, btw…Jonjo…really? I’m supposed to be scared of him?) just seemed cobbled together out of what a professional thug is supposed to be. The dog was an interesting touch, but seemed quirky for quirkiness’s sake. Ingram was the biggest oddity of them all; a CEO with no balls, power, drive or ego. He wasn’t a type A at all and to be the head of a biggish company like he was, you have to have those. I did like Mhouse though in a strange way, and was sad at her ending. The way Boyd moved them all around each other was good; I liked the serendipity of a lot of it. But as characters they left me sort of disconnected. I will read others from Boyd though.
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