In a speech about the Arab spring at the Edinburgh world writers’ conference in 2012, the Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif questioned the place of the novel in the white heat of political turmoil. “Attempts at fiction right now would be too simple,” she said. “The immediate truth is too glaring to allow a more subtle truth to take form… Your talent – at the time of crisis – is to tell the stories as they are, to help them to achieve power as reality, not as fiction.”
Five years later and the hopefulness of those early days has been lost amid the horrors of Syria and Libya, the watery deaths of refugees fleeing the bloodshed. Against this dismal backdrop, Soueif’s statement appears to hold largely true. There have been some excellent nonfiction books dealing with the crisis – The Optician of Lampedusa by Emma Jane Kirby and The New Odyssey by Patrick Kingsley among them. And while some novels – by JM Coetzee and Aleksandar Hemon, for instance – felt like they were inspired by the nightmarish visions of the past few years (and by the west’s shamefully half-hearted response) – we are yet to have a great, direct novelistic response.
Lawrence Osborne is an enigmatic, unpindownable writer – an enthusiastic traveller who lives in Bangkok and has published broadly in fiction and nonfiction. I read with pleasure his The Ballad of a Small Player (2014), set in the gambling dens of Macau, and was intrigued to hear that he’d turned his attention to the migrant crisis. Beautiful Animals springs from one of the most poignant images to come out of this dark chapter – the migrants who wash up on the white-sand beaches of fabled Greek islands.
Naomi Codrington is the daughter of a wealthy British rake, Jimmie, the founder of Belle Air Airways living much of the year on Hydra, one of the Saronic islands just off the Peloponnese. He’s married to the ghastly Phaine, Naomi’s stepmother, “from an illustrious line of military fascists”. Naomi is in her early 20s, bored and disaffected, recently fired from a rather improbable job at a London law firm after her too-spirited defence of a Hackney kebab shop owner.
Also on the island are the Haldanes, New York Wasps of impeccable breeding whose daughter, the 20-year-old Samantha, is an object of interest to Naomi, who reads something familiar in her “steady and cool” eyes: “perhaps like herself a student of human beings and their calamities”. A few pages later, we find Samantha mirroring this interest. “So, she thought, Naomi’s like me. She’s tormented.” The girls are brought closer together when they find a migrant, the “beautiful” and well educated Faoud, half-dressed and hungry on one of the island’s strangely deserted beaches, his eyes “the colour of black olive tapenade”. They decide to help him and set in train a series of events that culminate in Faoud fleeing the island, bound for Italy.
The narrative moves between Naomi and Faoud as the sinister Rockhold, her father’s ex-military henchman, sniffs around. There’s some good tension, but the ending fizzles out, with Naomi sitting on a pontoon, meditating on the transitory nature of friendship. It feels as if the instinct that propelled Osborne was a generous, expansive one – to show the change inflicted on a pair of pampered, precious young women by the proximity of the Syrian genocide. Unfortunately, the girls aren’t up to the task, their responses obvious and adolescent, the reader’s sympathies left wildly oscillating.
After Sebastian Faulks doing Wodehouse and William Boyd reviving Fleming, Osborne will soon be the latest to carry out that voguish act of literary metempsychosis, stepping into the shoes of Raymond Chandler to bring back Philip Marlowe. It’s a hard act to follow – Chandler’s prose is immaculately lean. One of the problems with Beautiful Animals is that Osborne is an adjective and adverb junkie, his language over-stuffed and sometimes painfully high-flown. People don’t live in places, they are “domiciled” there, they don’t agree, but “acquiesce”; a hotel isn’t relaxing, but “conducive to disarmament”.
Such weighty prose strips the plot of its zing, and we’re left with a novel that feels as if it aspired to be something more than it is: a novel that lingers only briefly in the mind, briefer still in the heart.
• Beautiful Animals by Lawrence Osborne is published by Hogarth (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
