A Review of Chris Power’s “A Lonely Man”
Writing About Writing
Books about writers doing the act of writing are a dime-a-dozen it seems. I can recall reading Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, which was like reading a long dissertation on how to have a career as a prolific writer. Even David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue, a more recent read, is a book about writing songs and how art comes to fruition through the inspiration and writing process. (So even though it is not necessarily a book about literature or writing as a literary act, it kind of is a book about writing in some ways — if you can think of songcraft as a writing exercise.) You can probably come up with more examples, but here’s a new one: Chris Power’s debut novel A Lonely Man. It is a book about writer’s block, a book about stealing other people’s stories, and a book about travelling across Europe to gain some Old-World literary inspiration. It is also a thriller, though that aspect of the book is a bit more muted.
Set in Berlin (for the most part), the book opens with a writer named Robert Prowe (whose surname is an anagram of Power’s) reaching for the same book in a bookstore at the same time as a man named Patrick. Later on, that same evening, Robert and his wife save Patrick from a vicious beating on the street after he leaves the store. When Patrick then offers to buy Robert a drink on another day as a favour, Robert can’t say no. It turns out that Patrick is also a writer, too — he’s a ghostwriter, and his latest client was a deceased Russian oligarch whose death may or may not have been a suicide. It turns out that Patrick is being followed by people who may or may not want him dead, too — and, pretty soon, as Robert and Patrick become “friends” so that Robert can steal Patrick’s recent life story for a novel he wants to write, Robert begins to notice strange things happening to befall him as well.
A Lonely Man is not a bad thriller. It is well written. However, the thrills don’t really add up to much on the page and you can kind of see the ending coming from a mile away. (It also helps if you know something of recent Russian history and politics, and that’s a topic of interest for you.) In any event, the main problem the novel has is that its inciting action is fed by a main character who continuously makes bad choices. If Robert had saved Patrick but had declined his offer of meeting up later, then A Lonely Man would have been a very short book, indeed. Also, if Robert decided to not write down Patrick’s story for his own novel, well, (and here’s a spoiler alert) he wouldn’t have gotten himself into any sort of hot water. Thus, it’s hard to take any sort of pity on the plight of Robert Prowe. He doesn’t seem too hardwired to realize that he’s walking into danger, so it is hard to take pity on him.
The book does, however, succeed in making you feel a little bit — not a lot, but a little bit — paranoid from the get-go, because the people who may be following Patrick seem to be in the shadows for Robert. The thing is, there’s not enough of that in the book. You have Robert going off early in the book to check in on a property he owns with his family in Sweden, and while being alone in the cottage offers some chance at some genuine creepy “is he being followed?”-style chills, the opportunity is squandered by Power, the writer. Instead, the author of this tome is more interested in how writers come up with their stories, and the art of literary theft. It’s interesting for a plotline, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. In the end, what you get in A Lonely Man is a bit of a hackneyed story.
Still, for all of its faults, the novel is fairly short and can be read in a sitting or two. It does have atmosphere, even if it is of the mild variety. And there’s the kernel of a great idea in how Robert exploits his new friendship to get something he can sell for profit. Still, it’s the niggling things that keep nagging at you. For instance, and here might come another spoiler, if Patrick is somewhat aware that he is being used by Robert, why does he continuously keep meeting up with him in Berlin’s nightlife scene? It might have made for a much stronger novel if Patrick became something of a protagonist in his own right and started using Robert for his own means — that is, to remove the spotlight of those who appear to be following him and transition onto them onto the trail of Robert, instead, much more explicitly. And even though the ending is a bit chilling, it isn’t wholly satisfying because it doesn’t have any earlier payoffs. The novel meanders through a friend of Robert’s suicide, which takes up a significant third of the book without relating back to the Robert-Patrick axis. And, of course, Robert goes off to other countries, while Patrick languishes hiding out in Berlin, putting this friendship on hold for a great deal of the book.
Thus, A Lonely Man is just an okay book. It’s readable and has interesting ideas — it’s just that they don’t feel fully realized in any way. This is a shame because Chris Power has a gem of an idea for a book here — it just needs a little more cat in the cat and mouse game. (To wit, the end of the book has a scene with dead mice in it, which is a little bit of a nod to what Power is trying to do with this novel.) There’s a lot to think about when it comes to this book, but the thing is you probably won’t think about the book too much when you close the cover for the final time. Still, A Lonely Man offers an interesting and intriguing premise, and offer’s up one heck of a what if? That is to say, what if there was more paranoia in A Lonely Man, and what if it actually had something concrete to say about the writing life? I guess for the rest of us, we’ll have our Stephen Kings and David Mitchells. That’ll do. That’ll do.
Chris Power’s A Lonely Man was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 4, 2021.
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