Book review: “Ordinary Thunderstorms” by William Boyd

William Boyd’s thriller “Ordinary Thunderstorms”, published in 2009, is not one of those normal thrillers you can think of when you talk about reading an everyday thriller. It is an interesting story that brings different aspects together and combines them into an exciting story.

        Adam Kindred, the main character in the story, arrives in London in order to find a new job. He accidently gets involved in a murder and, from that point on, tries to vanish in that big city, as he is wanted by the police as the real murder.  Through that dilemma he turns from an affluent member of society to a beggar who lives under the worst conditions.

        The main plot of the story is about the production of a new drug called Zembla-4 that is supposed to cure asthma. However, during the trial period it becomes responsible for the death of several young patients. William Boyd leads the reader through the story from different points of view. All in all, it is a story about Aram Kindred, who meets different people of all social classes, always trying to find himself. These different people, who are involved in Adam’s story, are also described along with their ways of life. This gives the whole story a high degree of information. It enables the reader to feel involved. Boyd’s detailed information about his characters shows the reader the differences in their lives, owing to the different social classes they come from. The character of Adam is somewhere in between these classes, where he is always struggling to find his identity and wishing to get back to his old life, where he had a set position in society. William Boyd himself says that he tried to keep his characters as real as possible to make it easy for the reader to believe that his fictional creation could be a story happening every day.

        Within the story Boyd gives a detailed view of London. He introduces different districts of London with their own characteristics including the different people there. The author says he has chosen this city for the setting of his book, because London is his hometown and probably the city he knows  best. Moreover, London is the best example of a diverse population: social differences, multicultural communities, the young and the old, etc.. London, Boyd says, is ‘gigantic and unique’. Boyd’s motivation to write the story came from the river Thames, where 50 to 60 dead bodies are found in a week. The river has had a huge impact on his story and it is also the central point of the setting.

        Even though “Ordinary Thunderstorms” seems to be a thriller, its general theme is the identity of an individual. It also has a moral: “Even good people do wrong things”. Not everything is as it seems. William Boyd supports his thesis through the main character, who is an innocent man and who, out of the blue from one day to the next, has to transform his entire life, because of a miserable misunderstanding

In conclusion, I would recommend the book for anyone who likes to read an exciting story with a lot of background information and different characters (in their social and cultural aspects). The book is written in an easy style. It is not a thriller in the normal sense, but it is a story about the different aspects of city life. Even though the conclusion of the story is rather a bit sudden and unexpected, the book, in my opinion, has a successful and interesting story.

                                                                                             

                                                                       Sinja Heusch, SIII