This book is really well written and I finished it quite quickly, but it also left me feeling a bit empty. There’s a bluntness to the narrative and a lack of clear meaning that I can appreciate on some level: it fits with the hyper-masculine, war-veteran bodyguard character István who isn’t interested in (or capable of) unpacking his trauma…. but some of the lacunas and blanks felt hollowing.
I don’t need every book to have magic or mystery, but something about the novel felt almost too materialist. The life of the super rich in London just isn’t that interesting to me, and the stakes sometimes felt oddly skewed. At moments it felt like I was reading a strange modern fairytale of male privilege: you arrive relatively poor from Hungary after leaving the army, somehow drift into the world of security and underground connections whilst working on the door of a strip club in Soho, and suddenly you’re in the lap of the mega-wealthy in Chelsea, accepted into their orbit.
I did like the emptiness of the London super-rich lifestyle though, down to the pointless parties and precarious and dodgy financing.
The beginning really drew me in: being inside the head of this young man growing up in Hungary and experiencing his first sexual (abusive) relationship had a lot of promise. In many ways the book moves from one sexual relationship to the next, with a lot of attention on his conquests and the women he’s drawn to. There are some blunt but interesting moments in that vein. Maybe that’s one of the central themes? How sex can bruise and build us, how we use it to try to anchor, ground, and also get out of our heads.
Ultimately, it’s a book I felt compelled to finish, but it didn’t feel as nourishing as it might have been. Still, it’s undeniably well written, and the slight nihilism of the main character is interesting to witness even if it left me a little cold. There are many moments of emotional truth that pierce the deadpan delivery.
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