UNTIL I FIND YOU
by John Irving
Black Swan, £8.99
Irving is, by any standards, an extremely successful writer, with a string of awards and bestselling novels — several of them filmed — to his name. He has been compared to Dickens — presumably because his books contain a lot of characters — and to Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps because of his jokey style. But there the similarities end. Until I Find You is typical Irving; over-long, facetious and packed with tiresome sex scenes, generally involving passive men and dominant women.
It opens with Jack Burns, aged 4, travelling with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, in search of his philandering father, William, who has abandoned them both. The best thing about this part of the novel — which moves from Edinburgh, where Jack is conceived, through various European cities, to the red-light district in Amsterdam — is its description of the tattooist’s art. Irving is nothing if not thorough, at his research.
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Jack’s schooldays at a Toronto girls’ school where he is the only boy are described in similar detail, as is his deflowering by an older woman. Later he becomes a cross-dressing actor, then a Hollywood film-star. He meets more thrillingly assertive women.
His mother gets cancer and dies. Finally he tracks down his father.
All these developments are given exactly the same weight, and are depicted in exactly the same dull prose. This book will doubtless sell as well as its predecessors have, but it is difficult to see why.
THE DIVIDE
by Nicholas Evans
Time Warner, £6.99
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The discovery, by a father and son skiing in the Rockies, of the young woman’s body frozen into the ice, is the start of Evans’s psychological drama, which displays the same insight and warmth as his earlier bestseller, The Horse Whisperer. The dead girl is Abbie Cooper — who, with her German eco-terrorist boyfriend Rolf — is on the run from the FBI for a string of crimes, including murder.
The trail that leads from Abbie’s privileged New York home to a lonely death in the wilds of Montana is one of the novel’s concerns; another is the failing marriage of her parents, Ben and Sarah. The failure of this relationship when Ben meets a younger woman is detailed with painful honesty, as is the guilt that Ben feels at his daughter’s rejection. His gradual realisation that abandoning the family for his young mistress may have triggered Abbie’s extremism is powerfully conveyed.
With novels of this type, written with Hollywood adaptation in mind, there is always a danger that sentimentality will prevail. Unfortunately that is the case with the ending here, in which the warring parents are reconciled, surviving family members affirm their love for each other and the horrors of what went before are swept under the carpet. But until this point there are some good dramatic moments and some trenchant comments, made via the mouthpiece of Abbie and her eco-warrior friends, about the US Government’s iniquitous environmental record.
A FLORENTINE REVENGE
by Christobel Kent
Penguin, £6.99
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One of the pleasures of Kent’s absorbing whodunnit is the precision with which its Florentine setting is described. Nor does its atmospheric account of the city’s history seem gratuitous, since the main character, Celia Donnelly, is a professional guide. Escorting the wealthy businessman Lucas Marsh and his young wife Emma around the city’s churches and art galleries should be all in a day’s work for her — but turns out to be more fraught than she had expected.
Lucas, it emerges, has an ulterior motive in visiting Florence, of which even his wife is unaware. Fifteen years earlier, he had been at the centre of a tragedy that shocked the city and whose effects are still being felt. These include Luisa Cellini, who runs a dress shop, and her husband Sandro, a policeman, whose investigation into a brutal killing awakens memories of an earlier, unsolved murder. A Ukrainian gangster, an anore xic beggar and an eccentric artist all have parts to play in what follows, but their exact roles become apparent only much later, by which time the tension has been ratcheted up nicely.
As well as her evident relish for Italian art, architecture and fashion, Christobel Kent is adept at creating believable characters — a great advantage for a thriller writer. Thus, Celia’s dismal love-life, the troubled marriageof Luisa and Sandro and the joys of shoe shopping add interest to the central mystery, but do not distract from it.