William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms

William Boyd, Ordinary Thunderstorms (Bloomsbury)


It has been said, although I daresay it’s unproven, that we are all only two mistakes away from walking the streets, sleeping rough, being reduced to begging. I’ve often wondered where I would go and how I’d try to survive if and when it happens to me. I doubt if it would be quite as eventful for me as it is for Adam Kindred in this tale.
Kindred doesn’t make mistakes but quite innocently suddenly finds himself a fugitive from the law and underworld goons with all the evidence suggesting he has committed murder in part of a complex pharmaceutical industrial espionage war.
After only a few days he is drinking water straight from the Thames by Chelsea Bridge and has to trap a gull for food. But if disbelief has to be slightly suspended for how he finds himself in such a position, it continues to be tested throughout as, in the interests of satisfying the thriller genre, a raft of both good and bad luck seeks him out.
What Boyd draws for us through this engaging device is a picture of a brutal underside not far below the surface of contemporary Britain. The body count, having begun so early, steadily accumulates as desperate people at various levels of society fight for their lives. The vastly rich powers that run the world and a very seamy low life are counterpointed as the prevailing influences while most of us are trying to pursue our mundane, domestic, unremarkable lives.
The naming of Ingram Fryzer, after the murderer of Christopher Marlowe, seems like a heavy-handed bit of literary referencing but the name Adam Kindred, the central character, seems to suggest that he is an Everyman figure and all this could happen to anyone. It is to be hoped not but the story is an uncomfortable reminder that, in the same way that we are always only a few feet away from the nearest rat, we are only avoiding the most perilous adventures by the skin of our teeth – for all we know.
Boyd is a fine writer, which we surely know already, and his use of the thriller is successful for me although it must be said that I haven’t read any Dick Francis for many years and my preferred fiction usually wouldn’t feature much action beyond someone looking out of a window and speculating on the prospects of afternoon rain.
However unlikely some of this might seem, Boyd has enough material from real life to keep it within a recognizable frame, not least when Kindred, improvising a new identity in a hospital porter’s job, claims to be a Manchester United supporter during the inevitable workplace football discussion. The Church of John Christ is also an interesting organization and counter-intuitively here ostensibly a force of genuine good. The joke told by Adam’s blackmailer just before his foreseeable demise near the end of the book is a suitably horrific commentary on another contemporary obsession but couldn’t be repeated on a respectable website like this.
But it would be better to stay within the fragile bounds of civilised, off the peg life, thank you very much, than encounter the range of thrills and scrapes described here. The picaresque journey allows a number of otherwise invisible places to be looked at, and it is probably distressingly a more accurate account of life in Britain today than one would like to think. And there, but for the grace of God, I’d prefer it to stay between the covers of this most diverting novel, one that I recommend quite highly.