Book of the dayFiction This article is more than 7 years oldReviewThe Fall Guy by James Lasdun review – shades of Hitchcock and Highsmith
This article is more than 7 years oldA banker, his wife and cousin take a holiday in the Catskills in this menacing thriller of money and betrayalSummer, 2012: Charlie and his cousin Matthew set out one evening in Charlie’s Lexus to join Charlie’s wife, Chloe, at their summer home in the Catskills. It’s a complex relationship. Charlie, you sense, usually gets what he wants. Matthew is more the junior partner, always offering, always giving, always biddable. In fact, before we know it, he has already agreed to get out of the car, catch a train back to New York and pick up a bracelet Charlie left behind. By page four you think it’s odd that Charlie’s so insistent, in his understated, manipulative way; by page five you’re wondering which of them might be the fall guy of the title.
Matthew is perfect for that role, but James Lasdun’s third novel is billed as a thriller – albeit a psychological one – so Charlie, a banker who can throw a few tins of Osetra caviar into the shopping basket without a thought, has, as possible patsy, one major textual credential: he doesn’t seem like anyone’s victim. As for Chloe, what can you say? For Matthew it’s “never a neutral event” to see her. She is beautiful. Although he has no designs on her, they share, he believes, a perfect understanding that extends from art to books to cooking.
Matthew’s loyalty to Charlie and attachment to Chloe are a source of pleasant tension in his life. At times he seems like a cicisbeo, a tame secondary husband in what he thinks of as Chloe’s “realm of fantastical enchantment”. At others – especially when he pads quietly around the master bedroom in their absence, chancing upon her knickers in the linen basket – he seems more like an orphaned adolescent. All this is maintained in a calm if creepy way, until, amusing himself one day “with a kind of play acting of husbandly suspicion”, Matthew follows Chloe to a local motel. What he sees there soon causes his sense of role play to wear off, “giving way to the less amusing knowledge that he was in fact spying on her”; and everything begins to unravel.
When catastrophe comes, it’s not entirely what we expected and so much worse than we imaginedThe Fall Guy is good at depicting money and its way of life. There are plenty of empty conversations and some splendidly vicious parodies of food and drink jargon. The hills and woods, a kind of privilege in themselves, glitter around Charlie and his family as if seen through optical glass. In the end, though, despite their wealth, they only do what everyone else does on holiday: play tennis, swim in the pool, enjoy an assignation at a motel. Lasdun captures the simple pleasurable lethargy of these pastimes in ways that remind us he is a poet as well as a novelist. Of an afternoon by the pool, for instance: “Time stalled in a kind of endless looping eddy and all the pleasant sensations of this moment, the warmth and soft sounds and gentle motions, simply burbled on forever like some changeless screen-saver.”
Every scene comes preloaded with ironies we can’t yet decode, depths we can’t quite measure. Banking, after all, isn’t the world’s favourite profession, and Charlie has a million and a half dollars in his safe back in the city. The gothic lies in wait, even in the positioning of the guest house where Matthew stays when the main house is full, “an octagonal wooden eyrie with towering black pines behind and the abyss of the vast valley dropping almost sheerly in front”. Lines like this prepare us for the catastrophe: though when it comes it’s not entirely what we expected and somehow so much worse than we imagined.
With its deftly constructed narratives of guilt and buried resentment, The Fall Guy is more accessible than Lasdun’s previous novels, and filmic to the point where it can seem like a cleverly fleshed-out screenplay. Watching Matthew, Charlie and Chloe lure one another into a trap not quite of their own making has a certain shivery fascination. But sometimes our switches of allegiance – not to say the constant provision of herrings, red or otherwise – are managed so slickly that you think of Highsmith or Hitchcock rather than the author of The Horned Man. The formal jig danced with the audience’s expectations risks a loss of sympathy for everyone involved, including Lasdun himself.
Nevertheless his real intention remains clear and distinctively his own – the almost unbearably subtle construction of a central character to whom our only access as readers is through imposture. Matthew shifts and changes with the light, and in the end we’re left with the sense of an identity both menaced and menacing, a psyche swinging between anxiety, deep-seated aggression and constant mourning for a life that never quite got going.
M John Harrison’s latest novel is Empty Space (Gollancz). The Fall Guy is published by Jonathan Cape. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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