A Proustian hitman
Main de Botton
THE KEY OF THE TOWER by Gilbert Adair Secker, £12.99, pp. 176 It is tempting to argue that Gilbert Adair is a very underrated novelist but it is proba- bly foolish. It risks upsetting people who have been enjoying Adair's work for years, and never suspected that their favourite author was anything less than highly regarded. It also risks annoying that inevitable group who have been disappoint- ed by an Adair novel in the past (he has written three, The Holy Innocents, Love and Death in Long Island and The Death of the Author), and wouldn't want to hear praises sung of a man who wasted their time and perhaps money. And there's a final reason not to label Adair underrated — but it wouldn't be fair to mention that one quite yet.
The Key of the Tower is a slim, page- turning thriller. The hero, Guy Lantern, is a middle-aged English biographer, who takes his Mini across the Channel for a holiday in France. His mental equilibrium is delicate, he's come out of long years of analysis and psychiatric treatment required to help him recover from the shock of murdering, or rather, manslaugh- tering his wife (a car, winter, snow, ice, he lost control). Lantern is looking forward to some quiet days in Saint-Malo, but his plans are ruined when circumstances force him into the company of some crooked art dealers involved in counterfeiting. The plot gets complicated and increasingly implausi- ble, climaxing in a blood-splattered shoot- out and a car-chase.
Adair is for the most part parodying the genre of the psychological thriller. One of his characters is an aggressive SAS-style hitman with a profound understanding of and affection for Proust. He never travels without a revolver and well-thumbed copy of In Search of Lost Time, which he treats as his bible and claims has completely changed his life (though perhaps not in ways that Marcel would have intended). And if ever he finds himself in a crisis, he opens whatever volume he happens to be reading and never fails to hit on a sentence with great relevance to the matter at hand. This Proustian hitman seems to prove Nabokov's dictum that one can always tell a murderer by his taste for a fancy prose style.
The Key of the Tower, though short, gives the impression of being two different books. It starts quietly, realistically, narrat- ed with sober accuracy reminiscent of Paul Auster or Ian McEwan. But midway, the tempo changes, psychological realism is thrown aside and we enter the world of the pulp thriller, full of violence and broad humour. We witness the character shift from three to two dimensions, as Adair devotes his energies to conjuring up ever more far-fetched situations.
Which brings me to the real reason why this isn't the best moment in Adair's career to claim that he is underrated — because The Key of the Tower isn't ultimately a sat- isfying novel. It lacks direction and left this reader wondering whether the author hadn't simply grown bored with his charac- ters half way through. Adair is a fascinat- ing writer, but you'd have to look at his other novels to find out why.
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