ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS - William Boyd

First published in the Mayfield and Five Ashes Village Newsletter, Febraury 2010.

First, a bit of book trade news. The last twelve months have been the toughest in living memory Borders, and several regional and specialist chains have gone bust and Waterstones and British Bookshops have both posted multi-million pound losses. Yet in this corner of Sussex there are four independent bookshops in a ten mile radius. Rather more than our brilliant business modelling (don’t get so big you can’t afford the losses!) it is due to the fantastic support we get from our loyal customer base, for which we thank you, very much.

There is one of those small, yet fundamental changes coming upon us. The paper Booktoken will be no more - bookshops are joining the rest of the retail world and going electronic and as from Feb 1st, will only sell the new cards. Paper tokens will still be accepted indefinitely; an advantage they will keep over the cards, which will only remain valid for two years from issue.

I must confess to being a big fan of William Boyd. He writes superbly, can deliver a convoluted yet understandable plot and constantly varies his writing format - satirical farce, epic fictional autobiography, stories told in the third person and in the first. He is not one to sit back on his laurels and ‘churn them out’ as many of his contemporaries are happy to do. His last novel ‘Restless’ won a hatful of awards, including the Costa.

‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’ [Bloomsbury £18.99HB and £11.99 large PB] is probably his most complex so far. It is a thriller and tells the story of the unfortunate Adam Kindred, a research climatologist in London for a job interview, whose chance encounter with a man in an Italian restaurant leads to a series of terrifying coincidences that leave him stripped of everything he once took for granted. Framed for a murder he did not commit and finding himself at the centre of a pharmaceutical corruption scandal, Kindred is forced to disappear between the cracks of the sprawling modern metropolis.

The police are on his tail and so, for reasons that later become clear, is Jonjo Case, a psychopathic ex-SAS contract killer. Ditching his mobile and credit cards, it proves surprisingly easy for Kindred to erase the electronic trail of his identity. When he joins a church that offers free meals to the homeless, his new anonymity is underlined by a badge that gives him only a number, 1603, to denote his place in the faceless congregation.

Soon, Kindred slips inexorably into the ranks of the unnoticed. His new acquaintances are found among the dropouts who teem underneath the city's surface. Boyd takes the framework of a thriller and manipulates it to ask questions about identity, about what makes us human when all the outward manifestations of our individuality have to be abandoned in the name of survival. In Boyd's city, there is safety in sameness and the incuriosity of strangers. My only real criticism is of the central character - I had no real sympathy for him. He seemed to vary between being too stupid to survive in these circumstances to utter amorality and cynicism. We soon find that as well as losing everything he has in this chaotic coincidence; he has already thrown a comfortable life and marriage away for a sexual encounter with an infatuated student.

A wonderfully crafted, if at times flawed novel; many hallowed reviewers have described it as something of an allegory for our times, in that case - ouch!