The Fall Guy - James Lasdun

Hmm.... An interesting book, though I'm not sure it was necessarily a good one.  The plot is pretty simple: main character Matthew goes on vacation with his wealthy cousin Charlie and Charlie's wife, Chloe, serving as designated chef as a way of justifying his presence in their guest house.  But as the summer goes on, Matthew finds out something that begins to put increasing pressure on his relationships with both Charlie and Chloe, and which makes them uneasy with him in return.  Another person entering the picture leads to catastrophe.

This is a book that's slow to unfold.  Matthew is not a sympathetic character to begin with, and gets progressively less sympathetic as the book goes on.  Really, the characters in general are meant to be unlikable, but Matthew seemed particularly egregious.  Why?  Because he was dumb, that's why.  He wasn't nasty to hiding things or devious, he was just dumb.  He had all of these very naive visions about the world, despite having apparently lived through a lot, and it made a lot of his actions unbelievable.  It's obvious to us, as the readers, that his relationship with Charlie and Chloe really isn't on good ground to begin with, but Matthew keeps bopping along without picking up on any of the blatantly obvious social clues that float around him, letting him know that he is not, in fact, welcome with them.  Charlie is possibly equally unlikable, but that's just because he's a dick.  (And are seriously supposed to believe Charlie wasn't up to something all summer, too?)  Chloe I actually had more sympathy for, despite her bad behavior.  She seemed more "real" than the other ones and at least some of her actions made sense.

The catastrophic event that occurs near the middle of the book and occupies Matthew for its duration seemed to come out of nowhere, and didn't really fit in with the tone of the rest of the book.  Lasdun makes a genre jump here, and I'm not convinced that it really worked.  Also, there's not really much possibility that this would have gone on for as long as it did, because as I noted above, Matthew just isn't that sharp.  I am glad he got what was coming to him in the end, though it might have been more suitable if the car had run him over instead of having police in it.  Sigh.  Maybe if the book had been told from all three character perspectives and laid more of a chance for someone--or everyone--to be an unreliable narrator, this whole book would have been better, but I don't know.

Overall, a quick read, and not a bad one, but definitely not one that was as good as I thought it would be, and one I don't think I'll return to in the future.

2 stars out of 5.