Critically acclaimed in the crime fiction ranks for his Aurelio Zen novels, Dibdin is on less sure ground when he writes about things other than his Italian policeman protagonist. In this short novel he is attempting a Jim Thompson-ish roman noir, but his feel for the American white trash milieu necessary for the realisation of such a project is shaky in the extreme. The result is a rather blurred and cliche-ridden stodge that failed, certainly, to hold my interest.
The narrator is Anthony, a British journalist, whose wife, Lucy, has recently died in a plane crash. Anxious to gain knowledge of her life before he met her, he travels to a remote part of Nevada to meet her first husband, a down-beat named Darryl Bob Allen who is living in a derelict garage-cum-diner. On the way, Anthony has bought a gun, for reasons which are never fully explained, but, as the narrative is infused here and there by magic realism - dead Lucy keeps on appearing like a pop-up doll - perhaps we shouldn't expect a rational motive for anything that happens.
Darryl Bob baits Anthony with lurid stories of his sexual relationship with Lucy, and informs him that, even after he has moved out and Anthony has moved in, he managed to tape the newly weds in their most intimate moments in bed. Anthony listens, without displaying any particular emotion, then takes off, but leaves his revolver with Darryl Bob. Later he is approached by the police, who tell him that good ole boy Bob has popped his clogs in a fire, and that he is a prime suspect.
Anthony immediately absconds to France, where he is joined by his step-daughter, Claire, and her young son. There he has another encounter with the dead-but-won't-lie-down Lucy, sees Claire off for Paris, and keeps the little boy to do a spot of baby-sitting. Finis. And the import of all this? Well, echoing dear old Humphrey Bogart, it doesn't seem to amount to a hill of beans. According to the blurb, it is "a novel about love, sex, death at midlife, and the power of the past". It does indeed deal with those elements, but in an artificially contrived manner that at no time loses its aura of self-conscious plasticity. Zen and the Art of Superficiality, perhaps?
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic