Tuesday, April 28, 2015

"The Escape," by Adam Thirlwell


    I forgot to mention an excellent novel I read recently by Adam Thirlwell—The Escape. Thirlwell is a very skilled writer—he was noted by Granta as one of the best British novelists under 40 when he was 24 years old. And I think he is still under 40.

    Raphael Haffner is an aging womanizer who is staying in an ex-communist eastern European spa town to try to gain possession of a villa once owned by his dead wife’s family. Like most aging characters in fiction there is much rumination and reminiscence over the main events of his life while, in the present, he engages in two ‘affairs’—one with a middle–aged German hausfrau and one with the gorgeous Zinka, a yoga instructor who permits him certain physical liberties. And at the same time he is wrestling with the bureaucratic problems of trying to gain possession of the family villa.

    The narration is first person—a close friend—unnamed, who tells the story with considerable insight into Haffner’s thinking. This form of narration was apparently used in Thirlwell’s first novel, “Politics,” and was the subject of some criticism in the Guardian review of “Escape.”
    “With The Escape, his second novel, Thirlwell's voice has, fortunately, grown up, and he has produced an accomplished book that begins to realise his considerable potential. Thirlwell remains a mannered writer, to be sure, but the manners have become considerably more sophisticated. Although the narrator of The Escape still takes a proprietary interest in his characters, he has acquired sufficient poise to refrain from blurting out his opinions (a recurring tic in Politics), confining himself to oblique judgments, such as describing the less-than-heroic hero as "my squalid Don Quixote". And a very apt description it is.”

    Thirlwell’s main theme is sex, but generally he seems to treat it as comedy and farce, rather like Philip Roth: and Haffner has a definite resemblance to Mickey Sabbath in Roth’s “Sabbath’s Theater.” Mickey is a prototypical “dirty old man, with a strong affinity for whores, adultery, and the casual sexual encounter. Haffner is not quite that, but to give you a taste of where this clever novel goes, it opens with Haffner, concealed in a wardrobe with the door slightly ajar, watching the luscious Zinka engaged in sexual activity  with her boyfriend.

I recommend it—I read it in a few sittings, irritated by the need to stop from time to time.




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