Power’s novel is what might be termed deceptively slight. It’s a seductively easy read, set in the life of Robert Prowse, a British novelist living in Berlin, with his Swedish wife and two children. Much of the first half of the book is ruminatory, with the banalities and frustrations of Robert’s day-to-day life addressed, the pleasures of middle aged Berlin contrasted to his youthful visits to the city when he partied hard. As such the novel touches on the transformation of that city over the course of the late twentieth/ early twenty first century as the exhilaration of freedom gave way to the mundanities of capitalism. At one point I thought the novel was going to be a Toussaint/ Chejfec like drift, but narrative kicks in as Robert becomes absorbed in the story of Patrick, another writer he meets by chance who is fleeing Putin’s henchmen. Patrick had been contracted to ghost write the biography of an oligarch who got on the wrong side fo the Russian kleptocracy and died in suspicious circumstances. Patrick has fled, paranoid, to Berlin and relates his story to Robert, who gradually finds himself caught up in the tentacles of Moscow’s thread.
The acknowledgements show that Power has done his research and the novel forments a sense of growing dread as Robert inadvertently appears to be putting his family at risk. It’s an effective piece of writing, and a useful addition to the cannon of Putin’s novelists who include, of those I know, Pelevin, Sorokin, Lebedev and Prilepin.
Robert and Partick connect in a book shop when Patrick picks up an early Bolaño novel and they discuss the Chilean. (The novel concludes with another nod to Bolaño). To reference Bolaño is audacious, setting the bar exceedingly high. A Lonely Man feels far more like the throwaway earlier works of the dead writer, in so far as it shares that deceptive lightness; an easy read which might contain multitudes. Having finished the novel I looked up the author and browsed his twitter feed. Besides Roberto there are references to a host of others who influence I share. SK, Pinter, Calvino, to name a few. The author himself, it transpires, is part of the literary world of the UK and seems like an eminently likeable individual. Which is something he has in common with Robert, his protagonist. There’s enough in Robert to make him feel like an essential product of 21st Englishness. Which also had me thinking about why the novel perhaps lacks the punch of some of the author’s favourites. The conclusion I came to is that the problem is that everything is just a bit too likeable. One of the elements of being a white male Englishman in the twenty first century is that we want to be clear that, unlike our forefathers, we are not on the side of the oppressors. It might be a slightly Nietzschean vantage point, but there is a decadence in wanting to be liked. You don’t find it in Elizabethan or Jacobean literature. It’s a reasonable, even admirable, life goal, but it’s not great for literature. I might be wrong. but the writers we love (including the above named) never gave a flying fuck about being liked. The desire to be even-handed, to not offend has become engrained in modern liberal British culture. It is part of the both sides approach of the media and something the neo-Fascists have taken advantage of. For some reason it seemed to me that A Lonely Man, whilst a skilful and enjoyable piece of writing, somehow fails to land the broader punches it is seeking to make, for reasons that have to do with all of this. The book walks out on to the ice, the ice is threatening and beautiful, but the ice somehow never seems likely to crack. The surface will be described, ruffled, questioned, but it will never be broken.
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