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Overview
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.
Synopsis
A thrilling, plot-twisting novel from the author of Restless, a national bestseller and winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award.
It is May in Chelsea, London. The glittering river is unusually high on an otherwise ordinary afternoon. Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, ambles along the Embankment, admiring the view. He is pleasantly surprised to come across a little Italian bistro down a leafy side street. During his meal he strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterwards. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents through which Adam will lose everything - home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, mobile phone - never to get them back.
A heart-in-mouth conspiracy 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 the everyday city.
The New York Times - Terrence Rafferty
[Boyd's] a novelist of a kind that's fairly unfamiliar in this country, less rare in Britain: a debonair, versatile, casually philosophical literary entertainer—clever and thoughtful, but not so dauntingly brilliant that you suspect him of being, as Jeeves would say, "fundamentally unsound." Ordinary Thunderstorms is, like all his books, ambitious in an offhand, almost insolent manner, bringing home once again Boyd's favorite ideas about identity and the tribulations of the beleaguered self while also smuggling in a good deal of information about pharmacology, the Thames, homelessness in modern London, the formation of clouds, the internal politics of Blackwater-like private security companies and the peculiar charm of cult religions…He's all over the map, as his hero is, but the novel somehow manages to establish its own, unmistakable identity. And no matter how digressive Boyd sometimes seems to be, you can't accuse him of being evasive or of being untrue to himself. It's just that he's a writer with a lot of selves to be true to.
Editorials
Harper’s Bazaar
“William Boyd delivers a multiplot thriller full of twists and turns in Ordinary Thunderstorms.”Ron Charles
"Impressive. . . . Rich and engaging. . . . Boyd creates the rich spectrum of London with arresting cinematic detail. . . . Boyd gives a harrowing sense of how close and yet how distant the nether life of a large city is."The Los Angeles Times
"Boyd is highly adept at doing what novelists do best: exploring the multifarious possibilities implicit in human life."The New York Times Book Review
"Boyd has constructed a narrative machine of hilarious, near-impossible intricacy for the purpose of demonstrating that identity is fragile and that instinct, for better or worse, is not. . . . He is a debonair, versatile, casually philosophical literary entertainer—clever and thoughtful."The Wall Street Journal
"Charles Dickens lurks in the shadows of William Boyd’s gripping new novel, Ordinary Thunderstorms, which . . . has a Dickensian cast of characters—predators and prey, tycoons and paupers, charlatans and stooges—orbiting one another in the mean streets of London."Harper's Bazaar
"William Boyd delivers a multiplot thriller full of twists and turns in Ordinary Thunderstorms."The Daily Beast
"A thrilling story."Ron Charles
[Boyd] creates the wide spectrum of London—from its lawless slums to its posh boardrooms—with arresting cinematic detail. And the many characters who populate these pages, from drug-dealing prostitutes to drug-making chief executives, are surprising and sympathetic…The novel's most impressive quality is the way Boyd rotates through a large group of characters, allowing us to experience this crisis from a variety of perspectives—each slanted and usually wildly mistaken.—The Washington Post
Terrence Rafferty
[Boyd's] a novelist of a kind that's fairly unfamiliar in this country, less rare in Britain: a debonair, versatile, casually philosophical literary entertainer—clever and thoughtful, but not so dauntingly brilliant that you suspect him of being, as Jeeves would say, "fundamentally unsound." Ordinary Thunderstorms is, like all his books, ambitious in an offhand, almost insolent manner, bringing home once again Boyd's favorite ideas about identity and the tribulations of the beleaguered self while also smuggling in a good deal of information about pharmacology, the Thames, homelessness in modern London, the formation of clouds, the internal politics of Blackwater-like private security companies and the peculiar charm of cult religions…He's all over the map, as his hero is, but the novel somehow manages to establish its own, unmistakable identity. And no matter how digressive Boyd sometimes seems to be, you can't accuse him of being evasive or of being untrue to himself. It's just that he's a writer with a lot of selves to be true to.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Whitbread-winner Boyd (A Good Man in Africa) ventures into thriller territory with this fast-paced Hitchcockian wrong-man whodunit. While in London interviewing for an academic posting, climatologist Adam Kindred, by chance, meets immunologist Philip Wang at a restaurant. When Wang leaves a folder full of papers behind, Adam tries to return them to Wang's flat only to find the man's bloody corpse—and to leave evidence of his visit all over. Fearful of pursuing police and a persistent hired assassin, Adam flees with Wang's papers and goes underground. Meanwhile, at Wang's pharmaceutical company, the CEO uncovers a coup brewing to oust him and rush to market the anti-allergy drug Wang hadn't yet finished testing and for which the missing papers are crucial data. The disparate story lines eventually weave a competently plotted tale of corporate and criminal skullduggery that bows under the weight of improbable coincidences and stock characters. (Feb.)Library Journal
In his ninth novel, award-winning British author Boyd (Restless) seamlessly fuses a picaresque tale with the threatening storms of a thriller. Climatologist Adam Kindred, in London for a job interview, strikes up a dinner conversation with Dr. Philip Wang, director of a medical trial seeking a cure for childhood asthma. When Wang leaves behind his briefcase, Adam tracks him down, only to find that the doctor has just been murdered. With the killer still in the flat, Adam flees for his life, thus beginning his descent into London's underworld, where he will lose his identity, possessions, job, and reputation. Drawn inadvertently into a complex conspiracy involving pharmaceutical giants, he will need guile, tenacity, and the privileged information found in Wang's dossier to survive. On Adam's heels, Thames River cop Rita Nashe has her own family problems, as does Ingram Fryzer, a pharma CEO struggling to handle his disintegrating health while facing a furtive takeover of his company. VERDICT Not just for thriller fans, this engaging blend of trickery, danger, and human eccentricity will appeal to readers who enjoy not only John Grisham but also John Irving. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/09.]—Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, TucsonKirkus Reviews
Whitbread Award winner Boyd (Bamboo, 2007, etc.) employs thriller conventions to propel an intelligent, polished novel distinguished by full-bodied characterizations and understated social commentary. In London for a job interview after years of living in America, climatologist Adam Kindred chats briefly with a stranger in an Italian restaurant, then notices the man has left behind a folder. Extracting a business card, he heads for a Sloane Avenue apartment house, where he finds Dr. Philip Wang with a knife in his side. Wang dies after asking Adam to remove the knife, and the noise of an opening window and someone stepping inside sets him fleeing. Adam's reasons for not calling the police are fairly specious, but everything that follows is so compelling that readers won't care. Now wanted for murder, Adam goes deep underground, first setting up camp near the river, then finding refuge with a prostitute in a public-housing estate. Tough but not all bad, Mhouse is one in a cast of sharply depicted characters that also includes Ingram Fryzer, ailing CEO of the pharmaceutical company where Wang worked, which is just about to launch a new drug for asthma; Jonjo, a former soldier turned contract killer; policewoman Rita Nashe and her father, a cantankerous aging hippie; and Alfredo Rilke, sinister head of an international firm with a stake in Fryzer's company, which he intends to take over to reap the vast profits he foresees from the asthma drug. Boyd expertly juggles the action among these players to forward the nicely crafted plot, but the real interest lies in the way he expertly develops each individual character's emotions and personal history. The wonderfully ambiguous ending showsjustice served through savvy exploitation of Internet social networks, a shareholder meeting and the sensation-hungry modern media. But the real bad guys go unpunished, and Jonjo remains free to threaten Adam's tentative happy ending. Fine entertainment, and even finer as a thoughtful exploration of the intersections of different people in a modern metropolis.The Barnes & Noble Review
Poor Adam Kindred! Everything's going wrong. Kindred is a climatologist who in a moment of weakness falls victim to the flirtations of one of his graduate students and has sex with her in a cloud chamber. His furious wife divorces him. In an effort to start his life anew, he flies to England for a job interview and strikes up a conversation in a restaurant with a stranger, a doctor named Wang. Wang leaves some papers behind, Adam tries to take them to him and, next thing you know, he discovers Wang in his flat with a knife in his side. Trying to save the man's life, Adam pulls the knife out, but in the process, inadvertently, kills Wang -- leaving his bloody fingerprints behind him.
No good deed goes unpunished. Adam is now a wanted man, wanted by Wang's would-be killer, by the police, and by the pharmaceutical company for which Wang had been working. It turns out the company has been paying scientists to write favorable articles in medical journals about its new drug, Zembla-4, a cure for asthma that has killed 14 children in clinical trials.
William Boyd has been called a novelist who is good to his readers. And in Ordinary Thunderstorms he presents us with another of the pleasurable, intricately plotted and timely tales we have come to expect from him.
Adam flees and is cast adrift in London's dark underworld. He eludes his pursuers by literally stripping himself of all the modern appurtenances of identity -- his ATM card, his cell phone, his credit cards. He becomes a kind of No-Man, hiding out on the Chelsea embankment of the River Thames and surviving on roasted seagull meat. He perfects the art of begging and hoping for a good meal,he joins a New-Age church, the Church of John Christ, which claims that the Apostle John is actually the real savior. The Church, with its congregation of homeless people, illegal immigrants, and at least one pedophile, is funded by the City Hall Youth Outreach Programme.
Mr. Boyd is a specialist in creating hapless characters and then targeting them with humorous malice -- it's hard to forget Morgan Leafy, the hero of his first novel, A Good Man in Africa, who is, as he describes himself, "rude, sulky, bullying, selfish, unpleasant, hypocritical, cowardly, conceited," and whose chief interests are beer and sex. Morgan tries to rig his country's election and fails, then is charged by his boss with the task of getting rid of a smelly corpse.
Ordinary Thunderstorms is full of such vintage Boyd characters, including the prostitute, Mhouse, who, after first kneeing Adam in the groin, gives him her own kind of rough shelter. Among Mhouse's other tender ministrations is mixing her son Ly-on's morning cereal with rum and Diazepam to keep him asleep while she goes on her rounds. Mhouse's pimp and drug dealer, Mr. Quality, (Mr. Abdul-latif Quality), is also head of the Residents' Association of their ghastly housing project, which is known as the Shaft.
Unfortunately, the character of Adam lacks the juice of these supporting players. He is a rather hollow figure, and never comes quite alive for us. Perhaps this is because he is for the most part the passive victim of other peoples' cruelties, pursued by all but all too often failing to defend himself as he is robbed, hoodwinked, and betrayed.
Boyd makes up for this deficiency in his main character by his obvious relish for the details of his story. Like Dickens, who is clearly an inspiration here, he has a gift for naming things. The awful pharmaceutical company at the center of the plot is given the oddly globalized, de-nationalized moniker of Calenture-Deutz. The head of the company is Ingram Fryzer, a reference perhaps to Ingram Frizer who stabbed Christopher Marlowe to death in 1593. (One especially good detail involves Fryzer's morning meditation on whether or not he should wear underwear, because, Boyd tells us, he enjoys the feeling of his genitals against the rough cloth of his trousers.) The corporate raider who wants to take over Calenture-Deutz is none other than a man named Alfredo Rilke.
Boyd also displays in the novel his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of places and things. His novels have been set in locales as diverse as Africa, where he grew up (A Good Man in Africa, An Ice Cream War, Brazzaville Beach), to Uruguay (Any Human Heart), and Belgium and New Mexico (in his last novel, Restless, which focused on an obscure British spy ring in the United States during the 1930s). Boyd wrote so convincingly about the New York art world in his 1998 book, Nat Tate: An American Artist, that he managed to fool some people into believing that his main character was a real person, even though he was completely invented.
In Ordinary Thunderstorms, Boyd similarly puts on display a vast erudition regarding the city of London in general and of the River Thames particularly. We learn, for instance, that some 600 people disappear every year in London, and that because of the way the tide flow bends, half of all the corpses that end up in it are found in the loop of the Thames south of the Isle of Dogs.
For Boyd, as for Dickens, the Thames, with its refulgent waters and its cleansing tides, is not only the recipient of London's mortal debris, but also a source of the city's infinite renewal. At one point, Adam stands at the Kent estuary, where the Thames finally meets the sea. "The great flat expanses of the Kent marshes, with their winding fleets," Boyd writes, "their dykes and drainage ditches, were on their left, the wide river glinted, with a nacreous sheen, on their right, and their shadows were cast strongly on the path behind them as the sun occasionally broke through the ragged, high film of clouds."
Adam falls in love with one of the river's denizens, a female detective who lives on a houseboat with her father, an annoying, dope-smoking refugee from the Sixties and a specialist in Latin American revolutionary studies, who has never even visited Latin America.
At last, salvation may be in sight. But not before Adam, kindred spirit, ordinary, original man, has paid severely for his sins. --Dinitia Smith