Arms and the woman
Teresa Waugh
THE LAST THING HE WANTED by Joan Didion Flamingo, £15.99, pp. 227 To those who are unused to reading very much American literature, the open- ing few pages of Joan Didion's new novel, The Last Thing He Wanted, are reminiscent of the opening minutes of an American film when you suddenly have the terrifying feeling that you are listening to a foreign language and that you will be unable to understand a single word that follows. But in the case of Didion, it is well worth perse- vering because it doesn't take very long to get your ear in for what turns out to be a thoroughly enjoyable novel.
Didion's style, apart from having a strong American feel to it, is brisk, witty, quirky and no-nonsense. She has an excellent way of dropping little hints, like so many diverse, unrelated objects from an over- stuffed bag. You may glance at them in passing as they fall, pause to wonder briefly, then hurry away to match the pace of the novel; but they will remain there in the back of the mind, luring you on to dis- cover what, if any, significance they have in the story, or what bearing on the impene- trable character of the heroine, Elena McMahon.
The story is in fact told by a mysterious narrator who identifies herself as 'the not quite omniscient author'. For a while it seemed that she might be Elena's alter ego — or Elena with hindsight — but those theories fell flat and it looks as if she is exactly what she says she is, no more, no less. About the only things we ever learn about her are that her daughter was in school in California with Elena's daughter and that she, like Elena — and I believe Didion herself — is a journalist.
Your narrator may well be mysterious, but her mystery is as nothing compared to Elena's inscrutability.
Elena is a walker away. She has cut and run from her mother, she cuts and runs from her rich, Californian husband, from her daughter and then, at the start of the novel, she cuts and runs from her job as a journalist following the 1984 campaign trail. But haunting reflections of the past recur throughout the novel, making us wonder at times if Elena will eventually go back to a conventional life, if only for the sake of Catherine, her daughter in board- ing school, who has said reproachfully, 'We had a real life and now we don't.' Will she go back to the smell of jasmine and to the pool of blue jacaranda petals on the side- walk?
When Elena leaves the campaign trail for no one knows what reason, just as no one knows why she leaves her marriage she goes straight, and without thinking why she is doing so, to see her father whom she hasn't seen for some time and with whom she appears to have a tenuous relationship, to say the least.
Her father, Dick McMahon, is a brilliant character, both funny and poignant. All Elena's life he has been a wheeler-dealer and she has understood very little of what his business has been about; all that is quite clear is that he has never made the fortune he dreamed of. He drinks heavily, moves in and out of his daughter's life and occasion- ally leaves messages on her answerphone: `I've been trying to call your mother and that asshole she lives with refuses to put her on the line.' In fact the mother is dead.
Dick McMahon is getting old and getting sick and his last wish is that he will make that dreamed of fortune and have some- thing to leave his daughter after all. Thus it is that Elena becomes involved — her father is too sick to go — in flying into Costa Rica with a shipment of arms. There she is supposed to wait for the pay-off before flying straight home again. But naturally things begin to go a little wrong and Elena, dressed in a black silk shift with her sunglasses pushed up into her loose hair, is rather slower to catch on than the reader.
She leaves behind her a hopeless trail of clues, making the reader desperately long to warn her to be careful, so that when she lodges for weeks in a seedy hotel, under a pseudonym, she is blissfully unaware that her identity is known to all the shifty, dis- agreeable characters who drift in and out of the pages of the novel. She is ludicrously unsuspicious of them as they plot to relieve McMahon of his share of the spoils and to kill.
As seems frequently to be the case with thrillers, the end of this book is a bit of a disappointment. It takes you by surprise which is good, but not enough of the loose ends are tied up — as they may well not be in life — and it is a shame to be let down at the end of such a slick read.
`There was an old woman who swallowed a horse. She found it a perfectly acceptable alternative to beef of course.'
Previous page
