|
Tim
Lott's latest novel is a tale of a decent but jealous and insecure husband
who doubts the loyalty of his wife and the honesty of his children.
He recruits an outsider to provide him with the means to test his unwelcome
fears. If this were some Jacobean tragedy then the assistance might
come from some unscrupulous and malicious retainer willing to loiter
behind the arras or intercept sub rosa letters from the wife to her
gentlemen friends. But this is a novel of the early twenty first century
and Lott ingeniously casts this latter-day Iago as the female owner
of a shop selling surveillance systems to a needy public.
The
motif underlying the main narrative is that this new technology is a
baleful influence on the lives of his characters and, while not perhaps
causing dissonance, certainly amplifies it, furnishing alluring temptations
which lead the husband, encouraged by his accomplice, to a sticky end.
The author not only identifies covert surveillance as a primary villain
but employs it in the mechanism by which the story is told. The narrative
is sustained by a series of dialogues captured by CCTV (all helpfully
backed by pin-sharp audio) on devices hidden in various locations. Consequently
the book has a script like quality, but this is not to its detriment.
The author has used the structure skillfully. He paces the development
of the plot well, he sustains the reader's interest by unexpected turns
and he uses the dialogue efficiently. The shop owner's brittle wheedling
exchanges with the husband give early signals of her mental state and
establish our fears that she is going to drag the hapless man to perdition.
All this makes us want to read on.
Though the main theme is dark it is lightened by the author's wry humour
as he describes the quotidian tensions which beset any marriage and
the low intensity warfare which persists between parents and teenage
children. Part of his argument is that such commonplace events could,
with modern technology as a catalyst, boil over into something altogether
more damaging.
There are two elements in the book which do not work well. Having embraced
the concept that this story is being told retrospectively based on the
tapes which were made at the time, the author propels himself on to
the stage, in his own persona, as a jobbing writer hired by the aggrieved
wife to write a history of her husband's travails. This sets up a subplot
between the wife and the author as she complains of his intrusive probing
of intimate details. She demands forfeits of him before she will agree
to further questions. The price for him is that he must relate hidden
episodes from his own life of which he feels ashamed. All this is a
distraction from the main narrative and seemes to serve no great purpose
beyond allowing for some rather leaden reflections on the pain of a
violated privacy. Given his skills I think Tim Lott could have got this
message across with a much lighter tread.
The second weakness is on the final page where Lott obviously doubted
whether we would seize the moral and felt he must ram it home with portentous
blank verse. At this stage the independently minded reader, not willing
to be led by the nose, might want to rebel, contending that the disaster
which has unfolded in the previous pages was caused by the canker in
the souls of the main character, not by technology. It could be said
that if these individuals had been placed in 17th century England, rather
than the present, entropy would still have set in: possibly aided by
eavesdropping in its very literal sense. But that is a fresh argument...
David
Petch is a commissioner on the Independent Police Complaints Commission,
and will be speaking as part of a panel on 'Surveillance
society - protection from ourselves?' at the Battle of Ideas
festival at the Royal College of Art in London on Sunday 29 October.
|
