This Le Carré Stuff
Chris Power, A Lonely Man
Faber, 320pp, £14.99, ISBN 9780571341214
reviewed by Nicholas Harris
One has to worry when writers write about unhappy writers, especially when the (fictional) writer is similar to the (actual) writer. Martin Amis has confessed that the narrator of The Information (an impotent, dejected man, and failed writer) was an outgrowth of his own mid-life crisis. This is not evidence of cloudless self-esteem, and on first acquaintance with Chris Power’s writer-narrator Robert Prowe — who while almost being called Power is, like his creator, approaching middle age and the author of a successful book of short stories — one wonders if the same malady has struck.
Whether self-doubt is the source of this novel or not, allow me to be the first to offer a word of reassurance: this is a delicate and unsettling novel, woven with postmodern resonances. Though about writers and writing, it never sags into self-satisfaction with its metafictional conceits. Instead, no detail is redundant, lending the plot a thriller’s suspense and topicality.
The story begins when writer Robert, skulking around a bookshop before a reading, reaches for the same book as a fellow writer, Patrick. They briefly talk, and after a later chance encounter when Robert and his wife Karijn save Patrick from a drunken brawl, he insists on taking Patrick for a drink to thank him. The two of them connect, and it is gradually revealed that Patrick, a successful ghost-writer of footballers’ biographies, is in hiding here in Berlin. He had been commissioned to ghost-write the life of Sergei Vanyashin, a Russian oligarch, but after Vanyashin’s suspicious death, Patrick believes that the killers are after him too.
What the USSR and the Cold War were to Our Man in Havana, the gangsters’ paradise of Putin’s Russia is to Power’s novel. And much like Graham Greene’s protagonist, Robert is initially sceptical of the world of geopolitical intrigue Patrick is describing, even as its menace becomes more evident. However, as they continue to meet, he does see the yarn as the potential germ of his much-delayed novel. He maintains a healthy cynicism, wondering if he could ‘keep a straight face if Patrick persisted with this Le Carré stuff’ before they meet in the ‘Soviet War Memorial Treptower Park’.
But with the aid of a covert Dictaphone, he begins to turn Patrick’s life into fiction. From this point, sections of the book metamorphose into Robert’s work in progress, and we see Patrick meeting Vanyashin for the first time and then being flown by helicopter to the oligarch’s country pile. There’s plenty of sub-Fleming fun to be had here: the omnipresent alcohol, the coquettish 19-year-old model, the looming Russian bodyguards. But while this is Patrick’s story, it is also Robert’s construction, a diversion from the comfortable but mundane family life he really leads.
Though happy with his wife, two daughters and holiday home in Sweden, Robert is also a faded raver, and around Berlin sees former hedonistic hotspots evolving into suburban dormitories. But tragedy begins to impinge on his life too when Liam, a friend, former colleague and fellow raver, hangs himself. Robert returns to London for the funeral, and remembers an all-nighter he and Liam had shared a few years ago: ‘He stared at the carpet, his vision narrowing, the carpet seeming to pulse . . . as everything had pulsed on that weekend with Liam long ago, the last lost weekend Robert ever had.’
Power’s style is understated, perfect for short stories where it is necessary to convey depth in brevity. A single image can light up an entire scene, as when an ‘ambulance . . . made the street flicker blue around them, as if they were walking through a silent electrical storm’, or when the ‘golden grains briefly hissed as they slid from the tube’ when a sugar is added to a coffee. Sometimes, however, less can simply be less, particularly when certain narrative avenues are not pursued. If one of the novel’s concerns is middle-aged masculinity (and it is), fleshing out Liam’s life and better understanding his death felt like a missed opportunity, even if the point is to emphasise Robert’s own feeling of isolation.
Perhaps, as Patricks says to Robert early on about Roberto Bolaño’s novella Antwerp, ‘It’s more of a mood than a story, isn’t it?’ This is particularly true of the last third of the novel, when the true nature of the threat Patrick faces begins to be revealed. But as the the novel enters its most thrilleresque phase (breathless running, hushed phone calls, trashed apartments), Power keeps his balance, juxtaposing this with Robert’s ‘real’ life of cooking for his children and preparing family holidays.
This tension — between life and the parasitic narratives we fasten onto it — is what drives the novel. We even find out that Vanyashin, whom of course we only meet through Robert’s depiction of Patrick’s story, told Patrick a fake childhood story in the course of their interviews for the biography. The opening image, of two men reaching for a book (though it turns out even that encounter was less chanced than Robert thought) remains the enduring motif.
Whether self-doubt is the source of this novel or not, allow me to be the first to offer a word of reassurance: this is a delicate and unsettling novel, woven with postmodern resonances. Though about writers and writing, it never sags into self-satisfaction with its metafictional conceits. Instead, no detail is redundant, lending the plot a thriller’s suspense and topicality.
The story begins when writer Robert, skulking around a bookshop before a reading, reaches for the same book as a fellow writer, Patrick. They briefly talk, and after a later chance encounter when Robert and his wife Karijn save Patrick from a drunken brawl, he insists on taking Patrick for a drink to thank him. The two of them connect, and it is gradually revealed that Patrick, a successful ghost-writer of footballers’ biographies, is in hiding here in Berlin. He had been commissioned to ghost-write the life of Sergei Vanyashin, a Russian oligarch, but after Vanyashin’s suspicious death, Patrick believes that the killers are after him too.
What the USSR and the Cold War were to Our Man in Havana, the gangsters’ paradise of Putin’s Russia is to Power’s novel. And much like Graham Greene’s protagonist, Robert is initially sceptical of the world of geopolitical intrigue Patrick is describing, even as its menace becomes more evident. However, as they continue to meet, he does see the yarn as the potential germ of his much-delayed novel. He maintains a healthy cynicism, wondering if he could ‘keep a straight face if Patrick persisted with this Le Carré stuff’ before they meet in the ‘Soviet War Memorial Treptower Park’.
But with the aid of a covert Dictaphone, he begins to turn Patrick’s life into fiction. From this point, sections of the book metamorphose into Robert’s work in progress, and we see Patrick meeting Vanyashin for the first time and then being flown by helicopter to the oligarch’s country pile. There’s plenty of sub-Fleming fun to be had here: the omnipresent alcohol, the coquettish 19-year-old model, the looming Russian bodyguards. But while this is Patrick’s story, it is also Robert’s construction, a diversion from the comfortable but mundane family life he really leads.
Though happy with his wife, two daughters and holiday home in Sweden, Robert is also a faded raver, and around Berlin sees former hedonistic hotspots evolving into suburban dormitories. But tragedy begins to impinge on his life too when Liam, a friend, former colleague and fellow raver, hangs himself. Robert returns to London for the funeral, and remembers an all-nighter he and Liam had shared a few years ago: ‘He stared at the carpet, his vision narrowing, the carpet seeming to pulse . . . as everything had pulsed on that weekend with Liam long ago, the last lost weekend Robert ever had.’
Power’s style is understated, perfect for short stories where it is necessary to convey depth in brevity. A single image can light up an entire scene, as when an ‘ambulance . . . made the street flicker blue around them, as if they were walking through a silent electrical storm’, or when the ‘golden grains briefly hissed as they slid from the tube’ when a sugar is added to a coffee. Sometimes, however, less can simply be less, particularly when certain narrative avenues are not pursued. If one of the novel’s concerns is middle-aged masculinity (and it is), fleshing out Liam’s life and better understanding his death felt like a missed opportunity, even if the point is to emphasise Robert’s own feeling of isolation.
Perhaps, as Patricks says to Robert early on about Roberto Bolaño’s novella Antwerp, ‘It’s more of a mood than a story, isn’t it?’ This is particularly true of the last third of the novel, when the true nature of the threat Patrick faces begins to be revealed. But as the the novel enters its most thrilleresque phase (breathless running, hushed phone calls, trashed apartments), Power keeps his balance, juxtaposing this with Robert’s ‘real’ life of cooking for his children and preparing family holidays.
This tension — between life and the parasitic narratives we fasten onto it — is what drives the novel. We even find out that Vanyashin, whom of course we only meet through Robert’s depiction of Patrick’s story, told Patrick a fake childhood story in the course of their interviews for the biography. The opening image, of two men reaching for a book (though it turns out even that encounter was less chanced than Robert thought) remains the enduring motif.