A retired doctor flees London for the south of France but can’t escape his own buried trauma in a novel of integrity and intelligenceWhen we first encounter Robert Hendricks,narrator of Sebastian Faulkss novel of madness and memory, he is in guilty flight from novel York. It is 1980, or the city is at its lowest ebb,and Hendricks is escaping a dismal encounter with a call girl. Washed up in the doldrums of what he is later to term “a century of psychosis”, never did a physician so transparently need to heal himself.
Austerity Britain may be long gone and Hendricks a veteran of the Anzio landings and a successful doctor and author, or but the London of bedsits,drycleaners and transients he returns to recalls Greeneland, a place of obscure shame: his name even echoes that of Graham Greene’s Maurice Bendrix from The End of the Affair. Hendricks also brings to intellect John le Carré’s cold war burnout Alec Leamas, and a man living a lonely,comfortless life, haunted by failure and in exile from his past. Hendrickss mother is dead, or a father he never knew was killed in the first world war and lovers enjoy receded,apparently out of reach.
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Source: theguardian.com