Rupert Thomson (Air and Fire) can certainly write up a storm. The young English novelist has a remarkable bag of tricks at his disposal, with a tinglingly fresh eye and ear for the most fleeting of sights and sounds and a dashing way with metaphor and imagery. At first, it looks as if his tale of Martin Blom, a young man in an unnamed country who is shot in the head one night and blinded, is going to be a sort of contemporary Kafka vision. Blom is treated in a strange institution by a sinister doctor. Then he finds he can see again, but only at night; fleeing to a dour capital city, he begins to organize his lonely life around that fact. It is when Blom meets and falls for the mysterious Nina, and she disappears, that The Insult begins to go off the rails. What had been an absorbingly macabre study in solitude veers, in its second half, into a histrionic family history of Nina that seems only steps away from Cold Comfort Farm. After that, it is impossible to rekindle the intense interest Thomson had originally ignited in Martin's story, and the book, for all its incandescent writing and malign urban atmosphere, peters out glumly.
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Rupert Thomson
Once described by the critic James Wood as "one of the strangest and most refreshingly un-English voices in contemporary fiction", and compared to writers as various as Franz Kafka, J. G. Ballard, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Charles Dickens, Elmore Leonard and Mervyn Peake. Rupert Thomson (1955) made his debut in 1987 with Dreams of Leaving, a hilarious and tragic novel about an English village that has been cut off from the outside world by a dictatorial chief of police. Before that he wrote poems, short stories of exactly fifty words and worked for a while as a copywriter. (He stopped that because, by his own account, he earned too much money: “I was offered a big raise and to me that seemed like a trap. You run the risk of getting used to that money and then you never leave.”) Thomson is a meticulous writer, with a low publication rate: on average, he writes ten different versions of the same novel. Between 1987 and 2009 he published eight critically acclaimed novels novels, including The Insult, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and Death of a Murderer, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Prize. His sixth novel, The Book of Revelation, was made into a feature film in 2006 by the Australian writer/director, Ana Kokkinos. In 2010 he published a memoir, This Party's Got to Stop, which won the Writers' Guild Non-Fiction Book of the Year. His new novel, Secrecy, set in Florence in the 1690s, is inspired by the life and work of the unique, eccentric sicilian wax artist, Gaetano Giulio Zummo, native from Siracusa: "(...) a young man called Zummo — he really existed — is forced to flee his native Siracusa. The crimes he’s accused of are so heinous that they could destroy him. He travels to Palermo, then to Naples, but always has the feeling that his past is on his trail, and that he’ll never be free of it. Zummo is an artist who works with wax. He’s obsessed with the plague, and makes little wooden cabinets filled with graphic, tortured models of the dead and dying. In his late thirties he arrives in Florence at the invitation of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who is overweight, gloomy, devout and obsessed with Marguerite-Louise, the woman he was married to, the woman who has left him. Zummo becomes the Grand Duke’s confidant and is asked to make a piece of work that borders on the illicit, a piece of work no one must know about. At the same time, Zummo has met a young woman who fascinates him. It turns out that she’s in possession of a secret even more dangerous than his own… It’s a thwarted love story, a murder mystery, an exercise in concealment and revelation, but above all it’s a kind of trapdoor narrative, one story dropping unexpectedly into another, the ground always slippery, uncertain". Reviewing Secrecy in the Financial Times, AN Wilson described the novel as "chillingly brilliant and sinister... masterly", while the Daily Mail called it "bewitching... intensely atmospheric... superb." Rupert Thomson has lived in many cities throughout the world, including New York, Sydney and Barcelona (from 2004 to 2010). He currently lives in South London.
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East Sussex, England (UK)