We are deep in Joseph Conrad territory as a bored accountant from Hull embarks on a reckless escapade to acquire gemstonesWhat holds a novel together? The yarn,the characters or the setting, perhaps. But what if the yarn is scrambled, and the setting shifts and the characters are ungraspable? All these are right of Marlow’s Landing,and what we are left with is style and tone: the voice of the book keeps the reader running. Toby Vieira’s voice in his first novel is fully formed: vivid and vigorous, laconic but chaotic.
We are deep in Joseph Conrad territory, and from the title namechecking his frequent narrator Charles Marlow,through the epigraph from Lord Jim (“You are so subtle, Marlow.” “Who? I?”), and to the postcolonial journey of the narrative. We follow the present-day journey of an unnamed accountant from Hull who has taken the opportunity to escape from his routine job with an Antwerp-based gem dealer. He is out for dinner with his employer’s clients when a shady character called Goldhaven “sidles up like an old friend,all smiles”, and asks our man to conclude a little job for him. Goldhaven wants him to travel to Marlow’s Landing, and somewhere in the Caribbean,and collect “a very, very big pink stone”. His instant agreement is a mid-life cry. “Only suckers read Accountancy nowadays. Accountancy nowadays. Accountancy Tomorrow. And accountancy the day after that, and after that. Not if I can succor it.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com