Book review   

By Tonio Kawase

William Boyd

Ordinary Thunderstorms

Ordinary Thunderstorms, written by William Boyd in 2009 as his 10th book, is a novel  classifiable into the thriller genre, about the conspiracy connected to the launch of a new pharmaceutical against asthma.

Adam Kindred, a relatively young climatologist, makes the acquaintance with a developer of the pharmaceutical group Calenture-Deutz, called Dr. Wang, in an Italian restaurant in Chelsea. He strikes up a brief conversation with the man at the next table, who departs, leaving a folder behind, seemingly including secret datas about a new drug. Adam decides to return it to Wang. After entering the man’s flat, he finds his dining companion lying on the fading away with a knife in his throat, which Adam stupidly pulls out.

With his fingerprints and other evidence affiliating him to this brutish murder of a well-respected medical scientist, Adam flees panic-stricken.

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Ordinary Thunderstorms By William Boyd Thriller 404 pages Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009 7,95 Euros (paperback)          ISBN: 978 1 4088 0606 7

hortly after a scavenger hunt involving a multinational pharmaceutical company the psychopathic assassin Jonjo, an ex-Iraq mercenary being crazy of fighting and engaged by them, begins.

William Boyd, the scottish author, who was born 1952 in Ghana and grew up there and in Nigeria, takes you on a turbulent tour through london and its facings from the sunny side to the underground, from upperclass doctors to low class‘s ghettoes.

These insights into the city‘s geographical and social structures do offer you a very multilayer reading experience subliminally connecting issues like CCTV in public areas or “the missing people problem“ with e.g. the chase of the main protagonist, Adam Kindred.

But most notably this book does not just entertain or thrill, if carefully read it leads the reader into contemplatively thoughts about social issues, problems of nowadays digital technologies in workaday live and even about the modern citizen‘s identity.

Although you learn a lot about about Britain‘s Capital, especially about the underworld, more than basic knowledge in its culture and primarily geographic should be in your mind. Otherwise you won‘t be able to understand the story and its facets completely and the same problem as I had will befall you e.g when acknowledgment about the circumstances of particular quarters is asked to have a better imagination of the story.

The book‘s main theme probably is the combination misbehaviour, acquisitiveness and avidity in many parts of the pharmaceutical branch, espacially in combination with the difficult accreditation of new drugs, which guarantee high benfits to the producer. So in Boyd‘s fiction the “bad“ part of this novel belongs to it, describing a company and its investor not only deciding about life or death of ill people. But also there are many other importantly remarkable subject matters as poverty embedding social segregation, religious sects, and illegal prostitutes. Linked to the book‘s title “ordinary thunderstorms“, which is described before the first page as “having the capacity to transform themselves into storms“, the author may wants to show us these partially relatively unacquainted issues, because they might grow into “storms“, trying to let us notice them before things get worse.

Maybe his intention also is to lead us to be more active in finding and solving problems in our everyday life‘s environment.

In the end you have to decide to read this very thrilling novel on any accounts it will enchain you until you have done reading it as well “Ordinary Thunderstorms“ will guarantee you some entertainment and maybe afford some thought-provoking impulse. If you like a bit lunatic novels full of pulsating action and a bit stereotypical setting, including the bad pharmaceutical business, killers, and other fringe groups, but giving you an interestingly different view about London and its society, buy it! If not or if it‘s too much grab some Charles Dickens Christmas Carol and enjoy your christmas vacation in a warm homely place.

In this spirit

A Merry Christmas