It’s true that most
novels nowadays are hostage to their covers, and in this case the novel does
little to undo the laziness of a cover which looks like some indifferent A level project. I was surprised because I bought the
book on the strength of a puff from Lionel Shriver in The Financial Times. She has an intelligent take on many things so
I was hopeful for the novel.
The novel has a plot
which is moderately interesting and perhaps more interesting to me because I
once knew a rich young woman who thought it would be a good idea to steal the
paintings and silverware from her even richer parents’ country home in order to
sell them off for a good cause. Like
Naomi - the lead character in this novel - she didn’t go to jail for it because
a judge from the same social class decided she was the victim of a manipulative
male and gave her a suspended sentence and her accomplice a stiff dose of
Parkhurst Jail.
But I felt the writing
was lazy. The 294 page book has 24 chapters and I began to feel that, yes, the author
gets up in the morning, knocks out a chapter in a couple of hours and then goes
off to do something more interesting. When he is short of inspiration, he takes
out the road map and makes a paragraph out of getting from A to B. When the plot threatens to lose all
credibility, he props it up with a hasty improvisation. So to make it minimally
credible that self-appointed detective Rockhold is able to get on to the trail of Faoud, he throws in an
assistant who is a phone call away with all the information he needs, and doubles
it up with a miraculous hotline to the Italian police. It is all terribly
casual.
I don’t do plot
summaries in my reviews but if I did in this case it wouldn’t take long. It is, I suppose, a
strength of the book that it sticks to one story and a small cast of central
characters who may be beautiful animals but are not otherwise terribly attractive
or interesting. As philosophers of their own lives, they fail badly, though you
could say that is part of Osborne’s point: they may be rich and beautiful but
when it comes to thinking, well, it's been done better. But for Naomi and her friend Amy, it doesn't seem to matter. They have money and don't really need brains. Only Faoud pays a heavy price.
