When the kissing stopped and the killing began
Andrew Taylor
TABATHA’S CODE by Matthew d’Ancona Alma Books, £18.99, pp. 325, ISBN 9781846880124 As a genre, perhaps the most important question that the thriller asks is this: do we care sufficiently about the hero to want him (or, of course, her) to survive? In this case the hero is Nick Atkins, who in 1989 is just down from Cambridge. On the brink of law school, he spends time in California, where his life is hijacked by Tabatha, a beautiful Stanford student with a taste for Yeats’s poetry. After several months, Tab abruptly and inexplicably decides that their passionate affair is over and sends him home. She promises to communicate occasionally through cryptic small ads in the California Literary Review.
For the next 17 years, her teasing, allusive messages flow like a dark subterranean current through Nick’s life. His ability to decode them depends on his knowledge of Yeats’s and Plath’s poetry, and occasionally other works. He is not allowed to reply to them. Meanwhile he abandons law and pursues an inglorious career — drifting eventually into teaching, he marries, has a daughter and, largely because of his obsession with Tab and her messages, alienates his wife. His main emotional support becomes his friend Topper, an endearing and fabulously wealthy retired drug dealer with a handy ex-SAS bodyguard.
Then the past hits Nick over the head with a blunt instrument. He is plucked from his comfortable inertia by shadowy intelligence operatives desperately trying to track down a network of anti-globalisation terrorists with the Yeats-derived name of Second Troy. They claim that Tabatha is running the network and that Nick’s knowledge of her, and his ability to decode her clues, offer their only chance of reaching her before the group brings about an atrocity that will throw 9/11 into the shade. Unfortunately his importance is also known to members of the network and to other interested parties. The narrative evolves into a double race against time as Nick searches for Tabatha, while others pursue Nick and the body count mounts higher and higher.
The plot is stuffed with stomachchurning incidents and with neatly managed surprises that switch the story in one unexpected direction after another. Tabatha’s coded messages provide a puzzle element with, as a bonus, fragments of Yeats’s poetry that will send many readers back to the original. The settings work well, too, whether in Europe or America. There’s a chilling authenticity to the Republican fat cats prowling among the fleshpots of New York — and, indeed, to the mildly debauched student radicals nearly 20 years earlier in California.
But what about Nick? Do we care what happens to him? Yes, we do — because in many ways his struggle to make sense of his life, with or without Tabatha, is the most moving and interesting part of the novel. All credit to d’Ancona — it’s one of life’s little ironies that it’s far easier to cope with a fiendish terrorist plot against the world as we know it than it is to portray a single flawed and credible human being.
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