Ordinary Thunderstorms

[Ordinary Thunderstorms] - William Boyd
The most famous acropachydermic was the poet W H Auden. Acropachyderma is a clubbing of the fingers, deformation of the long bones, and thickening of the skin of the scalp, face and extremeties. W H Auden died in 1973, but in the late 1960's he seemed to be almost a permanent fixture on late night intellectual programmes on the BBC. I often wondered about his incredibly wrinkled facial features: the wrinkles looked incredibly deep; I imagined they might have been caused by cigarette smoke, he always seemed to have a lighted cigarette on the go, or perhaps he had spent an ordinate amount of time on fishing boats, but no William Boyd tells us in Ordinary Thunderstorms it was acropachyderma, which was show more by far the most interesting thing in his 2009 novel Ordinary Thunderstorms.

Adam Kindred returns to England from America after a messy divorce. After a job interview he casually meets a man in a restaurant and they chat. The man leaves without his plastic folder and Adam decides to return it to him as he lives nearby. Adam arrives at his house to find the door open and the man lying in bed with a knife in his chest. Adam rushes over to help and the man tells him to pull out the knife. Meanwhile an intruder hiding on the balcony slips out through the front door. The man dies and Adam is left with the knife in his hands and covered in blood, he panics and rushes out of the apartment. From this moment on Adam's life is in turmoil, the dead man was a scientist, working for a pharmaceutical company, which is about to reveal a new wonder drug. Adam does not report the murder to the police, but has left enough evidence in the apartment to make him a murder suspect. A hit man is also trying to track him down. Adam takes to the streets living amongst the down and outs and then plays cat and mouse with the police and the hit man while trying to prove his innocence. Adam lurches from one adventure to another while a series of improbable coincidences keeps the story moving along.

Boyd is a good story teller and writes well enough, he can do humour and adventure and can lead his characters into tense situations. Of course its all baloney, and if two of the three female characters are whores (the other is a police woman) and expendable and the rich white male characters are cheating each other over in the big Pharma company and the man with acropachyderma gets murdered; well its all to be expected in such a novel. It mostly works itself out in the end, but although it is entertaining I did not put the book down with any feeling of satisfaction at the conclusion. Not quite storytelling by numbers, but close enough. This was one of the unread books on my shelves, it is now in the charity book box. 3 stars. show less

Have you ever wanted to slip under the radar and disappear from your present life? Adam Kindred is forced to do so in this fast-moving story of a man hunted throughout London by the police and hired guns for a murder he didn't commit. He develops elaborate ruses and skills to survive, trying to solve the crime involving CEOs of huge pharmaceutical companies while exploring options open to the homeless and the forgotten. Boyd's writing skills elevate the book above standard thriller fare and made me reach immediately for another of his titles, [b:Restless|72148|Restless|William Boyd|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170800234s/72148.jpg|865487].

There are some novels I read as a substitute for TV and for pure entertainment value. These include mysteries and some science-fiction. Ordinary Thunderstorms does not fit into either of these genres, but it is a novel to be read for pure entertainment value. It's not great literature, there are no deep revelations, no grand ideas, but it is well-written, highly readable and has an engaging story. It sucked me in, immersed me in its world for a while, and then let me off, not a better or more informed person, but a satisfied reader.

The story begins as Adam, a climatology scientist, has just completed a job interview which he believes has gone extremely well. To celebrate, he treats himself to dinner at an Italian restaurant in Chelsea. show more In the restaurant he exchanges pleasantries with another solo diner, during which he learns that the other man is also a research scientist. After the other man leaves, Adam notices that he left some papers behind, and Adam decides to return them (he had been given the man's phone number). This was a big mistake, and Adam soon finds himself on the run from both the police, who want to charge him with murder, and from a hulking giant who wants to kill him. Adam goes underground, and must learn to leave without cash, credit cards, housing and readily available food. The story of Adam's survival on the streets as a homeless person is interesting enough, but at the same time Adam also must make sense of what has happened to him. This all makes the book a page turner.

There is a small plot point at the end of the book that I was really annoyed by, so I was thinking of taking 1/2 star off, but since this didn't affect my enjoyment of the book until the very end I'm leaving my rating at 3 stars. show less

Have you ever wanted to slip under the radar and disappear from your present life? Adam Kindred is forced to do so in this fast-moving story of a man hunted throughout London by the police and hired guns for a murder he didn't commit. He develops elaborate ruses and skills to survive, trying to solve the crime involving CEOs of huge pharmaceutical companies while exploring options open to the homeless and the forgotten. Boyd's writing skills elevate the book above standard thriller fare and made me reach immediately for another of his titles, [b:Restless|72148|Restless|William Boyd|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170800234s/72148.jpg|865487].

Six-word review: Inventive thriller explores questions of identity.

Extended review:

Getting by outside the system, living an undocumented life in the Information Age, is a theme that has interested me since long before the advent of the Internet. From time to time I've even considered the idea attractive and read with a tinge of envy about those who have done it, or nearly done it. So I was immediately intrigued by the premise of this novel: an innocent man, framed by circumstances, is believed to have committed a murder and goes underground to evade not only the police but the real killers.

Adam Kindred has come to London to begin a new life following a major setback in the personal and professional spheres. The new life he gets is not show more the one he sought. Instead, a chance encounter puts him in possession of a file containing information that will fatally compromise a hugely profitable pharmaceutical empire, putting his life in jeopardy with its hired thugs, while police pursue him as the suspect. How can he survive, alone, friendless, without resources, while powerful interests are determined to suppress what he knows?

You know a novel has me in its grip when I bring it out of the bedroom. An hour's bedtime reading per night wasn't enough for this thriller: I just had to see what happened next, so I spent several hours on the sofa with it two days running, preempting my current living room reading.

Now, I won't deny that this book has a number of apparent flaws, the main one being overindulgence in the development of an extensive network of secondary characters. In several cases their stories are more in the nature of digressions than they are essential to furthering plot or characterization; for example, I see no relevance in the dialogue between a prostitute and her customer about whether to take a vacation together, and not much in the details of how a young woman keeps her little boy drowsy and tractable or a business executive ruminates on his underwear. Yet I'm happy to overlook such arguably loose elements of structure because those asides are interesting. Likewise, Boyd's vision of how his protagonist adapts to his circumstances and builds relationships that affect his future course may have more than a little of the implausible about it, but as (presumably) speculative fiction it is highly entertaining. To the extent that his depiction of the forces of menace might be realistic, I'm duly chilled by the thought that anyone I care about might ever have to disappear deliberately.

In fact, I was somewhat surprised by my own inclination to be forgiving toward mistakes of the very sort that I tend to judge harshly in other works; for instance, failure to distinguish between "infer" and "imply"; some evident confusion about commas; a misrendering of "biceps" as "bicep" (coincidentally noted in Dark Fire, reviewed here just a few days ago, and not with any leniency); and a misuse of rebound where he plainly meant redound ("its success would rebound hugely in his and Calenture-Deutz's favour" - page 302). What this point suggests to me is that my degree of impatience with defects depends significantly on my overall pleasure or displeasure with the book and not the other way around.

One of the aspects of this novel that pleased me, and this may just be a matter of my peculiar taste, is the odd and even borderline bizarre names that he gives to his characters. Here's a sampling:

Ingram Fryzer
Mhouse and Ly-on
Jonjo Case
Yemi Thompson-Gbeho
Primo Belem

Extraordinary names such as these draw attention to themselves. Indeed, the name of the focal character caught my eye almost at once: Adam Kindred, Adam-father-of-us-all Kindred-related. This name tags him as a candidate for Everyman. Is there something allegorical about this novel? Certainly there is something fantastic about it, something that invites us to look beyond literal meanings and ask what the author is really doing.

In this connection we can't overlook the opening. The first two paragraphs address the reader directly, the first words being "Let us start with the river"--the river, a fertile metaphor as old as literature. After the establishment shot, the second paragraph zooms the lens: "There he is--look--" and a voice-over foreshadows the volcanic upheaval that is about to occur in the young man's life. And then the author abandons this cinematic conceit, but not before we've heard an echo of an ancient literary tradition, of Greek drama, of Shakespeare, of "Listen, my children, and you shall hear," and even of the familiar storyteller's voice in an older generation of modern fiction that predates MFA programs and writers' workshop cautions against "author intrusion."

Thus alerted by two prominent markers, I soon found a third signpost in the name of the drug at the root of the conflict into which Adam has been drawn: Zembla-4. This is an overt allusion to Nabokov's Pale Fire, a 1962 poem-cum-novel* whose focal character is, or believes he is, or appears to be, an exiled king living in disguise under the name Charles Kinbote. Zembla is the name of his troubled homeland. The resemblance of Kindred to Kinbote, both characters living under assumed identities and in fear for their lives, can hardly be coincidental.

Are these references intended simply as an homage to Nabokov, complete with a minor but pivotal character named Vladimir, or do they signify something more?

When Jonjo Case sits down to a newspaper puzzle involving anagrams, I suddenly remembered that anagramming was a favorite game of Nabokov's and that he often used such sly verbal devices to conceal clues to hidden meanings and connections in his novels. Immediately I set about anagramming all those weird character names, using the help of an online tool to make a thorough job of it. I didn't fail to include Rita Nashe, a normal enough name but with an unnecessary e that might be there to fill out another word with rearranged letters. I came up with nothing. Perhaps Boyd is just playing with his story and with us, dropping these tidbits because he can, but I suspect that I have missed other dimensions.

I'm unable to answer my own questions. Like the novel itself, I'm leaving some loose ends, threads that may tie up in the future--what will happen when Rita learns more? whom will the river bring back, and what will happen when it does? who, after all, is Adam Everyman? and what will surface as I reflect further on this uncommon narrative? Perhaps the questions are the point.


So--I brought the book out of the bedroom to read it faster. I looked kindly upon the flaws. I pondered its subtleties. And then I made haste to acquire the author's next title, Waiting for Sunrise. That's how you know it was a winner with me.

-----
*Review of Pale Fire:
http://www.librarything.com/work/7714/reviews/80056936
  show less

In Ordinary Thunderstorms William Boyd has fashioned a fast-paced suspense novel, an edge-of-the-seat innocent-man-on-the-run thriller. Because of a chance encounter in a restaurant, Adam Kindred's life is irrevocably altered. A simple act of kindness turns lethal, and Adam finds himself on the run, pursued by a murderer, for whom he is a loose end, and by the police, for whom he is a prime suspect. All is not lost however. Adam, a climatologist by trade, is shrewd and resourceful. He uses his smarts (and a bit of luck) to turn things around, to construct a new identity and re-enter society as someone who does not have to spend his days looking over his shoulder. Boyd's ingenious narrative employs multiple perspectives as it zigzags show more through a labyrinthine plot. The reader is acquainted with all the players and witnesses the action from a variety of angles. It is a deft balancing act that the author carries off with apparent ease. Ordinary Thunderstorms is a thoroughly engrossing reading experience, a wise and entertaining novel in which danger lurks around every corner, but one that also has something profound to say about corporate greed and society's treatment of its less fortunate members. show less

Boyd is a favorite and this one is an exciting _Wrong Man_-like thriller set in London. A large pharmaceutical company is the lurking malevolence chasing our leading man along with the police. The Thames River and some of London’s darker denizens add verisimilitude to this adventure that is set off by a random chance encounter. Who are we (and what do we become) when we are forced give up modern life’s high-tech luxuries and live off the grid? Cinematic to the max and yet thought provoking.