More than any other member of the 1980s "Best of Young British" literary generation, William Boyd is concerned with story - and simple story, at that - not style. His peers, such as Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Peter Ackroyd and Graham Swift, have been writing novels of ideas, in which themes and motifs are deliberate devices, while Martin Amis has been performing dazzling linguistic gymnastics in satirical novels which aspire to the scale of American fiction, though missing its density and profundity. Boyd, however, has remained a traditional English comic novelist. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his new novel, Armadillo (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99 in UK).
Boyd's early books, such as his debut, A Good Man in Africa (1981), and An Ice-Cream War (1982), launched his reputation with British critics as a writer in the tradition of Waugh, though he lacks that writer's feel for language. Throughout this new book, however, the name which most often comes to mind is Kingsley Amis. The main difference between Boyd and Amis is that whereas the sour comedy of Amis pere is largely concerned with class, Boyd is interested in outsiders. In Armadillao, Lorimer Black is more than an outsider: he is concerned with inventing a personality which will guarantee him social survival rather than mere acceptance. He wants to conceal his family's foreign origins; as he finally admits to the woman he is obsessed with: "My real name is Milomre Blocj. I was born here but in fact I'm a Transnistrian. I come from a family of Transnistrian Gypsies."
His new name fits in well with his profession, that of loss adjuster. When we first meet him he has arrived for a business appointment with a man who has made a fire insurance claim. The claimant, however, is dead, having hanged himself in his factory. The scene is one of devastation: "the floor was still covered with the charred and melted naked bodies of a near-thousand plastic mannequins . . . the unchanging good nature of their expressions lent a certain touching stoicism to the scene."
Order is central to Black's project of sustaining his invented self. From the outset, Boyd works hard at giving life to his likeable anti-hero who collects valuable antique helmets from a dealer who also advises him on dress and social behaviour. Home is a flat in an old house on Lupus Crescent, an address he is uncomfortable with because of its associations with the disease. This unease has been slightly modified by the kindly old Lady Haigh who also lives there and can refer to an old family with the same name. She has a good rapport with Black and he likes her enough to adopt her dog. When not busy improving himself and his dress sense, Black is trying to solve a personal problem: he can't sleep, and has volunteered to assist in a sleep project.
The other half of Black's world is dominated by his family, who all live together and are involved in a black cab business. The map which he moves across is that of London; the city's geography asserts itself throughout the book. "We are all navigators, he thought, quite pleased with the romantic associations of the metaphor, millions of us, all finding our individual ways through the labyrinth." Life has been reduced to a daily struggle by car or tube around a universe which appears to consist entirely of the city which is never mentioned by name yet everywhere evoked.
Black is self-protecting and unsure. Professionally, all appears to be going well and each time he settles a claim at a reduced amount he wins a further bonus, which helps fund his collection of helmets. He has also bought a house in an artificial docklands settlement as a place to hide in.
Eager to please, he works with a grotesquely unpleasant bunch of individuals in a nasty environment run on deception, greed and bullying. Decent enough, he appears most concerned with altering his entire persona to meet the requirements of the situation of the moment. His relationship with his family has been undermined more by cultural differences than by dislike. Black has simply become more English than they are; he is also a lot richer and is constantly being asked for loans which are never repaid. Even when he becomes besotted with a tricky lady and forgets about the loyal part-time lover who has sustained him during the past four years, Black never quite loses our sympathy.
There are a number of running gags. Cafe life proves a favourite setting for his frequent, not overly funny general scene descriptions. Boyd's humour is more successful when specifically concerned with a gesture, a movement, an observation or event, such as when Black's head becomes stuck in one of his helmets. The general descriptions go on far longer than they should - as do the novels themselves.e, Black "looked around him now at the types scattered around the big gloomy rectangular room. A middle-aged couple - style: Eastern European intellectual - the man looking uncannily like Bertolt Brecht, both bespectacled, both in drab zip-up waterproof jackets. A table of four consumptive hippies . . . And behind them a man smoking tiny pipe who looked like a member of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War; tangle-haired with big muddy shoes, unshaven, wearing a collarless shirt and baggy corduroy suit."
Often throughout the novel the reader anticipates the lines, for Boyd does not rely on surprises. Most of the characters are caricatures. Early in the book it is obvious that Black's employers are not all they seem. The stage baddies are dangerously cliched, though Black's family members are well done, as are the family sequences. Boyd does allow his central character some moments of perceptiveness. "She looked a little worn out, a little tired, but, then again, didn't everybody? "
Readable, often funny, ordinary and certainly likeable, Armadillo has no pretensions and makes no demands, either on Boyd or on the reader. The frenetic sense of city life is deftly done, though, and overall, while it is not a memorable novel, it leaves you smiling, no mean feat, nowadays.
