I had in mind a project for a novel which would begin in the usual manner … except that gradually the characters’ identities would begin to slip and to blur, and so would the geographical surroundings. …Only the style of the book would remain consistent …. gradually … the work would become more troubling … until the appalled readers, unable to understand what was happening … and also unable to stop reading, would watch the wholesale metastasization … the collapse … so that when they finally put the book down they are aware only of having been protagonists in a deep and violent dream whose sole purpose is their incurable unease. (pages 226-228)
It is not often that an author postpones his statement of purpose to the closing pages of his work, burying it within the work itself, rather than in a preface, foreword, or note from the author. But that is precisely what John Lanchester has done in this novel.
Habitual preface-skippers will miss out on essential information, as the “preface” is a note from the protagonist, not from the author. And it sets the stage for the tone of the rest of the book.
Tarquin Winot is the anti-heroic protagonist of this book — he is, in fact, so anti-heroic that he serves as both protagonist and antagonist. Winot is verbose, opinionated, patronizing, self-aggrandizing, and entirely too fond of himself. He is also faintly sinister, but the faintness of that impression steadily diminishes throughout the narrative.
(If you can call it that. If James Joyce or TS Eliot were to write a murder-mystery, this book is a good example of what would result. It’s a stream-of-consciousness, flashback-ridden nightmare of a story.)
Winot is presented as a gourmet and connoisseur — but not in a sympathetic way. He is a dark and worrying figure, and the disjointed stories of his earlier life increase the darkness and worry. What begins to emerge is a person whose life has been strangely surrounded by bizarre and inexplicable tragedies. And a person who seems to have both a morbid fascination with death and a suspicious knowledge of the intimate details of the tragedies that touch his life.
This is a hard book to read, and it was only sheer, teeth-gritting determination that got me through the first two chapters. And then I couldn’t stop reading, even though I wanted to. I needed to understand what was being hinted at. I needed to know the end, even though it was all-too-baldly foreshadowed. If you can work your way through the page-long periodic sentences with their frequent interruptions and asides, you will, as the author suggests, find yourself waking from “a deep and violent dream,” afflicted by “incurable unease.”