A chip off the old Blocj
David Profumo
ARMADILLO by William Boyd Hamish Hamilton, £16.99, pp. 310 For his seventh novel — a comic thriller as entertaining as anything he has written — William Boyd has chosen for his central character a young specialist loss adjuster of gypsy extraction, whose hobby is collecting exceedingly expensive old helmets. He calls himself Lorimer Black, though he has changed his name to get on in the world, just as he customises his outfits according to the task in hand; indeed, a pair of social crampons is about the only bit of kit this ambitious creature doesn't have in his armoury.
Armadillo opens with Lorimer's discovery of a suicide in a north London mannequin factory (a 'topper', in the par- lance of his profession). At GGH Ltd, a sinister firm that sniffs out insurance scams and persuades people to settle for less, he is one of the golden boys, being a natural liar who comprehends the grammar of deceit. His fearsome boss, Hogg, believes theirs is a noble calling, since such 'adjusts' remind people that nothing is dependable in this life, not even careful financial precautions. The lucrative and ruthless routine of the office is curdled, however, when the feckless Torquil Helvoir-Jayne is appointed a director by his godfather, Sir Simon Sherriffrnuir, head of their parent company Fortress Sure.
The plot ostensibly concerns a complex property fraud, Tork's marital problems (his transmogrification into a minicab driver is one of the novel's happiest strokes), and our hero's infatuation with a fetching actress. As an anxious, insomniac male lead, Lorimer owes something to Henderson Dores — in places, the novas easy-over style seems a throwback to Stars and Bars (1984) — and by night his sleep is • monitored in the Borgesian-sounding Institute of Lucid Dreams. It becomes clear that he is being set up as a scapegoat, and his attempts to clear his name result in some brisk farce and dialogue that can be finger-licking good.
This is an intensely metropolitan novel, and whilst Boyd's vision of London is per- haps not as astigmatic as Iain Sinclair's, nor yet as cartoonish as that of Martin Amis, it has a murky, duplicitous feel to it. There may be more actual violence in Brazzaville Beach (1990), but there's enough vague menace here in the building sites and greasy spoons, plus the odd thug who would like to `do a chesterfield' on a debtor's back, with an industrial stapler. When Lorimer Black returns to his ances- tral home in Fulham, and we learn he is really Milomre Blocj — 'the J is silent and there is a dot under the C' — and that his family runs B and B Mini-Cabs, the true extent of the jigsaw starts to emerge. Once we have met his sisters and disabled father, plus Slobodan, the pony-tailed slubberdegullion of an eider brother who sponges off him, we have a true inkling why Milo/armadillo has built up his personal defences.
The seed crystal for this would appear to be Boyd's story 'Never Saw Brazil', from his last collection The Destiny of Nathalie X' (1995): there, a restless character called Wesley Bright runs B. B. Radio Cars but wants to change his name, which he regards as as irksome as an ill-fitting shoe. Run through the previous fictions of W. B. and you will find that monikers clearly count for something — Pfitz, Dunlde- banger and Cavenaugh-Crabbe are among the conspicuous coinages, along with the reverse-osmosis surnames like Paton Bobby, and Lorimer himself. Here, not only has the hero sought to reinvent him- self, we've got his lady love Flavia who married her husband for his handle (Malin- verno, a name that also cropped up in the previous book), and a ropy musician David Watts — 'the 349th richest person in the country' — who has adopted this mundane stage name from a Kinks' song. In his fancy journal 'The Book of Transfig- uration', Lorimer even professes an inter- est in Blaise Cendrars and Gerard de Nerval, but this embroidery seems a little voulu. From his epic The New Confessions (1987) on, uncertainty has been a familiar theme in Boyd's writing, and here it is put hilariously to work without recourse to fashionable mathematics or wave geome- try: Lorimer's progress is dogged by Zemblanity, which is 'the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries'. This is a concept one hopes the author will explore further, though intellectually this is not one of his big-game safaris — more of a rough shoot round the parish hedgerows. For the time being, readers will enjoy his headlong narrative with its typically deft vignettes and one-liners CI think my wife's a Catholic'). One curious development is that Boyd's prose seems to have developed a fondness for lists and parataxis, which occasionally seems like too much connec- tive tissue (the phrase is Vonnegut's). A recurrent motif here is to chart Lorimer's movements across the capital — 'through Barnet, Whetstone and Finchley, following signs to the City. .. ' — but the skit on `The Knowledge' becomes tiresome, never convincing us of the navigational theme.
But if there really is an association of Specialist Loss Adjusters, then I've got a Zemblan premonition that Mr Boyd ought to watch his back in case he gets the full chesterfield treatment.
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