Beautiful Animals

Lawrence Osborne

Hogarth, £14.99

Review by Malcolm Forbes

LAWRENCE Osborne’s latest novel follows the good example set by its predecessors in its treatment of travellers losing their way in exotic locales and either navigating, or orchestrating, evil under the sun. However, this outing also sees the British-born Bangkok-based author venturing out in new directions. Beautiful Animals is Osborne’s first novel to be set in Europe, his first to stay close to the tourist trail, and his first to go behind the headlines and tap into an ongoing crisis. The result is a taut and provocative psychological thriller with a topical twist.

Twenty-four-year-old Naomi is spending the summer at the family villa on the Greek island of Hydra. Sapped by the heat and frustrated by her father Jimmie and stepmother Phaine, she slips off for a swim one morning and meets Samantha, a young American on vacation with her parents. The pair click (“Naomi’s like me. She’s tormented”) and soon they are sampling the island’s open secrets and hidden delights.

But their sunny days cloud over when, while sailing on Jimmie’s yacht, they discover a young Arab lying in a sheltered cove. Fascinated by this “exhausted hobo of the sea”, the girls agree to help him, albeit discreetly: “Gossip and islands were natural conspirators”. Naomi takes Faoud under her wing and into her bed, but after realising she cannot count on certain people’s bought silence she hatches a desperate plan – one that involves him robbing her filthy-rich father and beating a retreat out of Greece.

Best-laid plans, neatly executed, provide cathartic release in fiction. This is all very well at the end of a novel but not before its midway point. Osborne maintains narrative momentum by scuppering Naomi’s plan, and by making murky deeds even murkier. A botched burglary leads to murder. Faoud flees, leaving Naomi, Samantha and complicit maid Carissa to dispose of bodies and cover their tracks. To stoke the tension further, Osborne brings in Samuel Rockhold, Jimmie’s old army friend and his “eyes and ears” – and also his nose, for along with “The odour of foreign wealth” Rockhold smells a rat. As he badgers Naomi for the truth and tracks Faoud through Italy, we read on, riveted, wondering who can get away with their crime, and at what cost.

Osborne has been likened to Graham Greene, and his 2012 Morocco-set novel The Forgiven drew comparison with Paul Bowles. But a more distinct literary forebear is Patricia Highsmith. Osborne’s last novel, Hunters in the Dark (2015), revolved around those key Highsmithian tropes of double-dealings and doppelgangers. In Beautiful Animals, Naomi Codrington may not spring from the exact same mould as Tom Ripley, but both characters are driven by skewed morals and selfish agendas, and both inhabit worlds where power-play, subterfuge and casual killing are routine manoeuvres and easy means to a dastardly end.

Naomi begins as an off-putting protagonist. Do we really want to be in the company of a spoilt, bored, sullen twenty-something? But as she welcomes Samantha and Faoud into her orbit and expels, then eradicates, unwanted elements, her determination becomes compelling and her deviousness delicious. As with the best antiheroes, the repellent attracts.

Not that Naomi is the book’s only dark force. Jimmie and Phaine are engagingly appalling, he a sexist, arrogant art collector who resembles “a decaying nightclub singer”, she a conceited snob who “comes from an illustrious line of military fascists.” Carissa initially earns our sympathy as the Codringtons’ long-suffering maid and Naomi’s “saviour in this madhouse” – until she exhibits a mercenary streak and desire for revenge.

If Osborne’s fiction is peopled by itinerants trying to stay afloat while out of their depth, then Faoud is his first character to have done so literally. Osborne shrouds him in mystery – is he a castaway or a vagrant or a migrant? – and only gradually reveals his identity, from his past in Syria to what made him risk the journey across the Aegean. It is while hiding in then escaping through foreign lands – Greece, then Italy – that another, more ruthless side to his character is exposed.

Osborne excels with Faoud’s back-story, but equally impressive is his backdrop. As ever, he goes further than relaying mere sights and sounds, flora and fauna. He blends in culture and history, customs and slang, making his Hydra a thoroughly immersive and thus authentic setting.

At one juncture, Naomi describes herself as “a student of human beings and their calamities.” Her creator is one too, for his enthralling Greek tragedy is a deft examination of unchecked greed, twisted loyalties and the corrupted mind.

Lawrence Osborne is at the EIBF on 12 August.