One May evening in London, Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, is feeling good about the future as he sits down for a meal at a little Italian bistro. He strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterward. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents, through which Adam loses everything—home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, cell phone—never to get them back.
The police are searching for him. There is a reward for his capture. A hired killer is stalking him. He is alone and anonymous in a huge, pitiless modern city. Adam has nowhere to go but down—underground. He decides to join that vast army of the disappeared and the missing who throng London’s lowest levels as he tries to figure out what to do with his life and struggles to understand the forces that have made it unravel so spectacularly. Adam's quest will take him all along the river Thames, from affluent Chelsea to the gritty East End, and on the way he will encounter all manner of London's denizens—aristocrats, prostitutes, evangelists, and policewomen—and version after new version of himself.
Ordinary Thunderstorms, William Boyd's electric follow-up to his award-winning
Restless, is a profound and gripping novel about the fragility of social identity, the corruption at the heart of big business, and the secrets that lie hidden in the filthy underbelly of every city.
And it's one of the most quietly effective and engrossing novels I've read this year. It began slowly enough and within a matter of pages had dived headlong into murder, conspiracy and mayhem. I thought to myself,
ok, another Mission Impossible take-off, I know how it'll develop. But no, that's not how it turned out at all, much to my surprise and interest! In fact, upon finding himself a victim of conspiracy, Adam Kindred doesn't go into flight. He instead goes into hiding - in plain sight. I found it hard to suspend disbelief initially. But the more I thought about it, the more realistic it began to feel.
That's the way I would do it under similar circumstances, or so I began to think. And that's the
true magic of this story. It feels unreal to begin with, then burrows into the reader's psyche and changes their whole perspective about it. Speaking as a jaded reader, I just love it when stories do that, for it's something truly rare.
I liked this story overall. What I did not like was how sometimes a lot of time would have passed between event A and event B without there being any mention of it. That gave it little jerky feel initially. And the other thing is the way the novel ended - in an ambiguous way. Now however the story (simple, complex, etc), I just prefer them with clear-cut endings. Either good or evil has to win - period! I hate it when things are left up in the air. Hopefully the way this one ended just forecasts a sequel in the making to this great story. In which case, I applaud the way things ended. Otherwise, boo!