The Book: Ordinary Thunderstorms, William Boyd.
It’s kind of a cheat, this one, because it doesn’t actually live in my house, but it was lent to me right before I started this blog and I thought it would be rude not to read and return! So it has snuck in, and I was delighted to receive it. I’m a big fan of thrillers, they are my down time, my relaxation read, and having spent the last few months buried in among other things the Man Booker shortlist, I needed to let my literary hair down.
I’m not a book snob. If it’s good, I’ll read it. As far as I’m concerned, there are no good and bad genres, only good and bad books. Thrillers, crime, women’s fiction, non fiction, if it’s well written and well plotted I’ll give it a go. Likewise I like to think I know a bad book when I read it, and would never choose a title just because it can be found in a particular aisle of the book shop. Book shops and libraries are big places and I always think it’s a shame if you confine yourself to just one section.
All of this is by way of describing my frame of mind when I opened ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’. I was expecting, and looking forward to enjoying, a thriller. I hadn’t read William Boyd’s earlier work, like many others I came to him via the spy story ‘Restless’, which was a Richard and Judy’s book club selection and sold extremely well. And don’t his publishers know it. In fact if you pop into Boyd’s very snazzy website www.williamboyd.co.uk you will be forgiven for thinking you’d entered Bourne or even Bond into the search engine instead. “One Man, One Choice, One Day to Disappear” is the message, superimposed over a gorgeous London street scene and the back view of the sharp suited man in question.
And if the website is a hint, the opening chapter of the book is a huge big neon sign pointing to the type of novel Boyd appears to be writing. It’s classic thriller stuff, very reminiscent of modern day American writers, the Jeff Abbotts and the Lynwood Barclays who take ‘one man’ (it’s usually a man), plunge him into a difficult and life threatening scenario and watch him trying to find his way out. In this case the man is Adam Kindred – what a great name! Can’t you just see him? With his sharp suit and short, just on the right side of trendy hair cut? He’s an academic, having lunch following a job interview. He strikes up a conversation with a stranger, notices he has left his folder behind, calls to the house to return it and… well you can hear the shrieking violins already. So far, so formulaic, so good if that’s the type of story you enjoy and, frequently, I do.
For the first few pages I totally accepted the premise. But after the opening chapter a couple of the sentences began to confuse me. Within paragraphs, Boyd moves from a classic, almost clichéd ‘everything went black’ style to very literary, wordy sentences including one word that stumped me to the extent that I had to turn to a dictionary. It was susurrus by the way. I apologise to anyone who uses it daily, I hadn’t encountered it before.
There’s an element of nonchalance, dare I suggest laziness about the plotting too. In order to root for the ‘one man’ in these scenarios you have to empathise with him and understand why he’s making certain choices. But a lot of the decisions taken by Kindred simply don’t make sense. He comes across a dead body but doesn’t call the police – why not exactly? His responses are hardly those of a rational high powered academic who presumably hasn’t had so much as a parking ticket in his life before. I’m not saying that all thrillers have to make absolute sense in the real world, but they do need to follow an internal logic. Even the much maligned Dan Brown has to offer an adequate explanation as to why Robert Langdon pushes up the tweed sleeves and starts chasing those symbols, and the reader must, for the duration of the novel, believe in his rationale. But I couldn’t connect with Kindred on that level, and found myself asking too many times why on earth he had taken a particular course of action.
That’s the criticism. On the plus side there is the bones of an excellent plot in ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’. Following the unfortunate events of the opening chapter Kindred decides to disappear, and what follows is an excellent account of how someone would manage to survive without the very necessary and very traceable accoutrements of modern society, credit card, mobile phone, photo ID and so on. Kindred finds himself fighting elements within the pharmaceutical industry and here again are common thriller themes including unscrupulous drug testing, the making and losing of vast sums of money and so on. There are some great characters too. Ingram himself lacks depth but the female cop who lives with her hippy father on a houseboat is a lovely creation and if this was another writer I’d wonder if he was setting her up for her own series. Likewise there is an extraordinarily moving look at the life of a prostitute and her young son, as well as a sharp and compelling portrait of an unscrupulous charity and the type of person who might populate it.
But a key feature of this sort of book is that everything, for good or bad is tied together in the end and in ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’ this simply doesn’t happen. Difficulties are experienced but never resolved. A conspiracy is uncovered and then, well, kind of fizzles away. A key character gets his comeuppance but not in the way the reader would expect and the whole thing ends abruptly and with no great sense of resolution.
I’ve read reviews of this novel that suggest it’s a black comedy, or a parody, an ‘entertainment’ written by Boyd as an aside to his more serious work. One critic pointed out all the amusing literary allusions that I will put my hand up and say I didn’t ‘get’. That’s all very well, and I’m sure Boyd had a whale of a time writing it but if a book looks like a thriller, is written mostly like a thriller and more to the point is marketed as a thriller then I think some people who hand over their cash will be disappointed if they don’t get a thriller. This book contains many elements of the classic whodunnitandwhy, and some people will enjoy reading it ‘straight’, but I couldn’t get away from the image of an author raising his eyebrow and playing with his audience and I felt a little short changed.
The next book I have my eye on is George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I’ll talk to you when it’s over, it might take some time…
Sinéad Crowley
