2007 Reading Challenge: Book 11
The Endings Man – Frederic Lindsay
I’m very glad this was the third Frederic Lindsay that I’ve read and not the first. Because if it had been I may never have got any further. There’s always a little pang of depression when a favourite mystery writer produces a novel you don’t like, an experience I had most recently with Michael Dibdin’s A Long Finish. And what’s most depressing about this one is that the book is pretty recent, completed in 2005, and currently the second-latest in the author’s DI Meldrum series. I’m not sure how much it inspires me to go away and read Tremor of Demons, published this year.
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This story tells of a detective novelist who gets collared for murder after someone (him? The police certainly think so) starts acting out his brutal plots on real victims. It employs a device which authors can use to great effect – turning the usual protagonist into a supporting cast member to be viewed through the eyes of someone else. Think, for example, how Terry Pratchett treats Sam Vimes in The Truth or Monstrous Regiment. And I’ve I’ve got to admit a certain amount of grudging respect for the technique. After having dwelt so firmly in Meldrum’s head while reading past novels by Lindsay, it is very interesting to see him from an observer’s perspective and we get phrases such as “the Calvinist Meldrum” and this:
“…it seemed to Curle that Meldrum was one of those men defined by their job. Assuming he had a private life at all, it was hard to imagine what it might be. A glance to the side gave him a glimpse of the raw-boned profile, big nose, long chin, thin mouth, giving nothing away. The hands surrounding the steering wheel were thick-fingered, old scars white on the back of the nearer, hands shaped by grasping tools, a workman’s hands.” (If memory serves me correctly, Meldrum was a carpenter in his youth.)
My problem in particular is with the observer; Barclay Curle, the very-nearly washed-up crime writer who takes centre stage in this book is a character who leaves me absolutely cold. Selfish, voyeuristic, misogynist, preoccupied, awkward, insensitive, procrastinating, self-absorbed and self-loathing, treating everyone who has the misfortune to share his life with utter disregard, he was not a man with whom I wanted to spend any time whatsoever. And particularly not the amount of time it took to read a 300-page novel about him. Also, there are worrying little nearly-biographical details that accord with things in the author’s life – for example, a late-career change of publisher and a lingering urge to write about Jack the Ripper (see Lindsay’s non-Meldrum novel Jill Rips for elucidation) which made the whole thing even more uncomfortable.
Now, there’s nothing to say that borrowing a few details from real life conflates the author with his character. In fact I think writers often use such details as padding where they matter least because it saves having to waste valuable thinking time on pointless invention. (The weirdest example I have come across being Arthur Ransome’s decision to give his Swallows the surname ‘Walker’ which he appeared to have borrowed from his mentally disturbed ex-wife. But I digress.) And there’s also no rule that says the main character has to be a pleasant, jolly bloke – I’m sure no-one really wants Hamlet, Hardy’s Jude Fawley or Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov round for dinner although we’re glad, in a purely intellectual sense, that they exist in the world.
However, for a reader to persevere in the face of an unlikeable protagonist there have to be other compensations (the sense of reading literature possibly being chief among them). And, while I found the plot and various storytelling devices in this novel very interesting, they didn’t compensate for having to spend time in the presence of someone who left me most of all with an overwhelming urge to go and have a damn good wash after reading about him. There may, I admit, have been a bit of character development but, having found the character in question so unlikeable, why should I actually care about these drops in the ocean? Add in a stuttering plot and an archetypal Lindsay villain who was telegraphed almost from the outset and I’m very glad I borrowed this from the library rather than going out and buying it. It’s the kind of book I even feel guilty about palming off on others via Bookcrossing…
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