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Conflicts of identity
By Terrence Rafferty |
February 21, 2010, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
AS William Boyd writes in the turbulent first chapter of his new novel: "He simply had to follow his instincts -- he had to be true to himself." The self in question here is an unremarkable young academic named Adam Kindred, who has become, with awful suddenness, a victim of dire circumstance, a puzzled plaything of fate: he is the only suspect in the murder of a man he barely knows, and the instinct he follows, blindly, is the one that tells him to run like hell.
Since Adam is completely innocent, this impulse seems, at first blush, rash and stupid, just the sort of irrational, spontaneous bad choice people in thrillers so often make, to seal their doom. But "Ordinary Thunderstorms" isn't a thriller, exactly, and Boyd isn't the kind of author who punishes his characters too severely for their spasms of unreason. His instinct, rather, is to put them through their paces, let them sweat a bit and then, in recognition of their services to his fiction, leave them in exhausted peace.
Boyd always has a fair amount on his mind so he rarely wastes time setting his complicated plots in motion. In "Ordinary Thunderstorms," unlucky Adam is laid low with cruel dispatch, reduced from mild-mannered job seeker to desperate, homeless fugitive in the space of less than 20 pages.
Visiting London to interview for a university post (he's a climatologist), he finds an important-looking file folder left behind in a restaurant by a solitary diner with whom he had exchanged some innocuous conversation. Attempting to return it, he discovers the man dying in his bed in a pool of blood and imprudently agrees when the victim asks him to pull a knife from his body.
Hearing a noise -- is the killer lurking? -- Adam flees the crime scene, and while he's dithering about how to approach the police, he's accosted by a sinister stranger, whom he decks with his briefcase. Panicking, he decides, more or less, to go on the lam, settling down on a secluded patch of waste ground near Chelsea Bridge.
Then things really get dicey. By the time this story has run its obstacle-strewn course, Adam Kindred manages to acquire a couple of brand-new identities and two new homes that are at least marginal improvements over his initial open-air accommodations: he first moves in to an extremely seedy and dangerous housing estate, where he cohabits with a prostitute and her small son; later, to slightly posher digs, briefly shared with a cheerful drug fiend. And all the while, in the interest of clearing his (original, fast-fading) name and avoiding becoming a murder victim himself, he's trying to find out what actually happened to the man he's accused of killing -- an amateur investigation that leads him into the darkest recesses of the global pharmaceutical industry.
It also leads him, after a few rugged weeks, to a startling realization. "It struck him," Boyd writes, "that now he really could say that Adam Kindred didn't exist anymore -- Adam Kindred was redundant, superseded, obsolete."
Comedy of identity
"Ordinary Thunderstorms" is, like most of Boyd's fiction, essentially a comedy of identity: an exploration of the joys and sorrows of figuring out who you are -- and then if necessary figuring out how to be somebody else. His novels are dense with fugitives and impostors, people in full, panicked flight from lives that have become too burdensome and messy.
In this new novel, he seems to have set out to write a Ruth Rendell story, in which stubborn character defects turn deadly under the pressure of mistaken perception and brutal coincidence. He has constructed a narrative machine of hilarious, near-impossible intricacy for the purpose of demonstrating that identity is fragile and that instinct, for better or worse, is not.
It is ambitious in an offhand, almost insolent manner, bringing home once again Boyd's idea about the tribulations of the beleaguered self while also smuggling in a good deal of information about pharmacology, the Thames, homelessness in modern London, the formation of clouds, the internal politics of Blackwater-like security companies and the peculiar charm of cult religions.
Since Adam is completely innocent, this impulse seems, at first blush, rash and stupid, just the sort of irrational, spontaneous bad choice people in thrillers so often make, to seal their doom. But "Ordinary Thunderstorms" isn't a thriller, exactly, and Boyd isn't the kind of author who punishes his characters too severely for their spasms of unreason. His instinct, rather, is to put them through their paces, let them sweat a bit and then, in recognition of their services to his fiction, leave them in exhausted peace.
Boyd always has a fair amount on his mind so he rarely wastes time setting his complicated plots in motion. In "Ordinary Thunderstorms," unlucky Adam is laid low with cruel dispatch, reduced from mild-mannered job seeker to desperate, homeless fugitive in the space of less than 20 pages.
Visiting London to interview for a university post (he's a climatologist), he finds an important-looking file folder left behind in a restaurant by a solitary diner with whom he had exchanged some innocuous conversation. Attempting to return it, he discovers the man dying in his bed in a pool of blood and imprudently agrees when the victim asks him to pull a knife from his body.
Hearing a noise -- is the killer lurking? -- Adam flees the crime scene, and while he's dithering about how to approach the police, he's accosted by a sinister stranger, whom he decks with his briefcase. Panicking, he decides, more or less, to go on the lam, settling down on a secluded patch of waste ground near Chelsea Bridge.
Then things really get dicey. By the time this story has run its obstacle-strewn course, Adam Kindred manages to acquire a couple of brand-new identities and two new homes that are at least marginal improvements over his initial open-air accommodations: he first moves in to an extremely seedy and dangerous housing estate, where he cohabits with a prostitute and her small son; later, to slightly posher digs, briefly shared with a cheerful drug fiend. And all the while, in the interest of clearing his (original, fast-fading) name and avoiding becoming a murder victim himself, he's trying to find out what actually happened to the man he's accused of killing -- an amateur investigation that leads him into the darkest recesses of the global pharmaceutical industry.
It also leads him, after a few rugged weeks, to a startling realization. "It struck him," Boyd writes, "that now he really could say that Adam Kindred didn't exist anymore -- Adam Kindred was redundant, superseded, obsolete."
Comedy of identity
"Ordinary Thunderstorms" is, like most of Boyd's fiction, essentially a comedy of identity: an exploration of the joys and sorrows of figuring out who you are -- and then if necessary figuring out how to be somebody else. His novels are dense with fugitives and impostors, people in full, panicked flight from lives that have become too burdensome and messy.
In this new novel, he seems to have set out to write a Ruth Rendell story, in which stubborn character defects turn deadly under the pressure of mistaken perception and brutal coincidence. He has constructed a narrative machine of hilarious, near-impossible intricacy for the purpose of demonstrating that identity is fragile and that instinct, for better or worse, is not.
It is ambitious in an offhand, almost insolent manner, bringing home once again Boyd's idea about the tribulations of the beleaguered self while also smuggling in a good deal of information about pharmacology, the Thames, homelessness in modern London, the formation of clouds, the internal politics of Blackwater-like security companies and the peculiar charm of cult religions.
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