The Fall Guy

By James Lasdun

Jonathan Cape, £12.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

WHERE would fiction be without weather? Poet James Lasdun’s expertly seamless thriller takes place over a few weeks of torrid heat in upstate New York, where his characters have gone to escape the cauldron of Manhattan and lounge by the pool in their rural retreat. As the temperature rises, so do emotions, heading inexorably for a showdown.

Told coolly from the perspective of Matthew, from the opening paragraph The Fall Guy shows the social and financial gulf between him and his benevolent and patronising wealthy cousin Charlie, with whom he has been invited to spend the summer in his mountainside home. The deal is that Matthew, a failed restaurateur fallen on tough times, will do all the cooking for Charlie and his enchanting wife Chloe, in return for a berth in the guest lodge.

It is just the breathing space Matthew needs as he decides what to do next. In his late 30s, the Englishman has lurched from one problem to another since he was expelled from school. When we meet him, he appears to be friendless, and almost penniless. Soon, we learn that the root of his problems lies not in his own fecklessness – or not that alone – but in the calamity that befell his family when he was a boy. His father, a hitherto respectable solicitor who worked for Lloyd’s Bank, had swindled clients out of their money, and disappeared, never to be heard of again. Charlie, who was then living with Matthew’s family while attending public school in England, obviously feels a lingering pity for what happened, and makes occasional generous gestures towards his cousin.

Lasdun depicts the uneasy rapport between the two like a cook throwing seasoning into the pot: a burst of dialogue, or a descriptive line sufficient to suggest the flavour of the highly artificial and privileged world in which Charlie and Chloe live, and which Matthew cannot but envy. He is also in love with Chloe, as she is aware, but treads carefully, not wishing to step over the invisible line of decency. “He loved making her laugh. It was the one bodily pleasure he was permitted with her; a harmless physical trespass. And since they seemed to find the same things funny, he did it fairly often.”

When he begins to suspect that this seemingly perfect and loving wife is having an affair, however, he is aghast. He wants immediately to warn Charlie, but without evidence he risks appearing malicious and destroying their friendship. Thus he begins to follow Chloe. When there is no longer any doubt that she is cheating, he finds himself watching in fascinated distress. “It really was as if he had become Charlie’s stand-in; a kind of surrogate cuckold, condemned to feel all the injury but deprived of any means of doing anything about it, even protesting.”

Charlie, meanwhile, has grown distinctly unfriendly, as if he thinks Matthew is undermining him in some way. Thus the summer turns tense, the principal characters harbouring secrets they cannot or dare not reveal.

There is impressive restraint in Lasdun’s plot and prose. Occasionally his style is overwrought, but mostly he writes with pleasing plainness. At the point at which the reader begins to question what kind of man Matthew is, the story gathers momentum. By now, the ghost of Patricia Highsmith has brushed the page. Readers familiar with Lasdun’s memoir of being stalked by one of his students will recognise the sickening sudden awareness that what had seemed innocent or carefree is tainted and threatening.

Intricately plotted, with the past unpeeling like sunburnt skin, this is high-class escapism, embedded in very believable long-held rage and resentment. Its only flaw, which might be too strong a word, is that a man as tightly coiled as Matthew is inevitably unfathomable, and the glimpses we are allowed of him by others do not match the man as he is presented to us. This leads to a faint suspicion of being cheated, of being kept unfairly in the dark. Yet such a device is perhaps necessary, as the full horror of finding a cuckoo in the nest is revealed. But who will be edged out and fall?