Book review- Leonie Lamp

Book review

 Ordinary Thunderstorms

By William Boyd

The fictional book “Ordinary Thunderstorms“was written by William Boyd and first published in 2009 in Great Britain. It is about the man Adam Kindred who comes to London for a job interview and becomes quite suddenly a victim of fate. He is the only suspect in the murder of a man he barely knows. He follows his instinct to run away and go underground instead of trying to explain the misunderstanding. 

The novel deals with the question of identity and shows a dark and seamy side of London. The author explores the question whether it is possible to live without an identity. He demonstrates in an exciting way how difficult it must be to live playing a cat-and- mouse game, not having enough money, or the possibility to use a mobile phone.

 The book features a number of sub-plots which are very interesting because most of them involve extraordinary characters. A good example is the policewoman named Rita, who lives with her father on a houseboat; another similarly unusual a character is the prostitute ´Mhouse`. In addition to these apparent “losers” who are living on the edge of society Boyd always depicts a variety of other characters coming from different classes of society, such as the successful multi- billionaire, Ingram Fryzer, the president of the pharmaceutical company, who although in one way successful is unhappy because he does not have the love of his sons.

William Boyd wrote this book was because of the river Thames in London. He had read an article in the newspaper about the fact that the water police pulls out from the river more than 50-60 dead bodies a year. That seemed to him an extraordinary number and reminded him of a book by Charles Dickens called Our Mutual Friend, which opens with a dead body being pulled out of the river. Boyd was also interested in identity; in particular the question of whether one can change one’s identity, what happens when one loses one’s identity, and how many identities we have: identity thus became a main theme in the novel. Adam Kindred loses all the things that make up a social identity, such as a job, a bank account, a place to live, money, even his own clothes. In this way he falls from near the top of the social structure -- middleclass, intellectual -- to the lowest of the low. On his way down Adam meets all kinds of low class characters.

William Boyd is not an autobiographical writer. He does not use his own life for material for his fiction; he prefers to invent and make things up by using his imagination. He portrays characters who are not very stereotypical. His main character, for example, is a climatologist who falls in love with a police-woman. In an interview Boyd once said that he thinks that people, who only read novels because they want to read about nice people and where everything ends happily after, should stick to romance or fairytales. According to Boyd every serious novelist tries to make the characters as non- stereotypic as possible but the story as real as possible. If you are a serious novelist writing a novel about the human conditions you cannot worry about whether this person is nice, do I like him or her; characters are complex portraits and even the nicest character slips up. Indeed there are no brilliant heroes in Ordinary Thunderstorms. The characters are carefully drawn and seem real and the story moves through all levels of London society. Boyd claimed that his aim was to try to capture society in all its dimensions in the book; he did not want to write about just one part of London and because of that the story features a prostitute, a successful middle class woman, intellectuals and multi- billionaires. The novel shows that avarice, animosity, cheating and crime is not limited to any social class in particular.

From my point of view William Boyd is an excellent writer in his use of language. He adopts the appropriate tone and style of speech for each character based on his or her social class. He puts himself in the position of Mhouse, for example, and writes from her point of view with the language she would use.

Moreover, I think it is not very easy to invent a story where the main character loses his identity and passes through all the classes of society and the story is therefore quite realistic. Even though the ending is a bit farfetched the story shows that you can make something out of your life even though you might seem to have lost it all.

To imagine or to try to imagine how it must be to be a non person in a way, to have nothing that makes you somebody: no clothes, no money, no passport,  no means of identifying  yourself, no means of participating in society except for at the most basic survivalist level like scavenging food or sleeping outside. It is quite a terrifying prospect for anyone who does not have to do it but in fact you just have to look around the city and you see people doing it everywhere.  

I can definitely recommend the book because it is well written and very interesting to read. The story is deliberate and every character has his particular role in the story. The novel is exciting and in almost no part of the story is it boring. Except for some unanswered questions the story holds together well even though the premise is not very realistic. The idea of losing one’s identity including all means of representation seems to me quite unlikely. Considering that is such an uncommon topic Boyd tells the story well. For that reason the novel stands out against other novels.  

The book is not fixed to any particular year or period. There is nothing mentioned in the book that says that this book is written in 2008 or 2009. You can read the book in twenty years and it still seems contemporary; you do not have to explain any references.

Leonie Lamp, S3