- A Lonely Man, by Chris Power. Faber, $29.99.
Chris Power, who has been a columnist for The Guardian since 2007, had his short story collection Mothers longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2018. His debut novel, A Lonely Man, is largely set in Berlin, where middle-aged English writer Robert Prowe is long overdue finishing a novel.
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At a book launch in Berlin, Robert meets Patrick Unsworth, a drunken English ghostwriter, who tells Robert that his latest book was to be about a dissident Russian oligarch, Sergei Vanyashin.
It was abandoned after the oligarch was found hanging "from an oak tree in the woods outside his Buckinghamshire estate", but Patrick still has the tape recordings of his conversations with Vanyashin.
While Vanyashin's death was officially pronounced as suicide, Patrick suspects it was a murder authorised by Vladimir Putin. Vanyashin had believed his book would be "a blade, and I want it in Putin's arse right up to the hilt".
Power is, through his two main characters, commenting on the loneliness and struggles of the creative process.
Patrick believes that he being now is being followed by Russian agents seeking the tape recordings, but Robert initially thinks him paranoid.
Robert also believes he can cure his writer's block by assimilating Patrick's story into a novel.
After all, "Stories are like coins, Robert thought, passed from one hand to another." And, "if Patrick's story about being on the run was a fantasy, he had chosen a credible enough villain".
Gradually Robert and Patrick's lives merge. Power has said, "I liked the idea of someone getting entangled in something without really knowing what they were getting involved in".
By appropriating Patrick's material, Power has said, "that some of the choices Robert makes in the book are very much about the ethical entanglements of that".
Fiction and reality become merged in what Power has called inter- textual "stacked realities". In this context, Powers has referenced the autofiction of Karl Ove Knausgaard and the tensions between two writers in Roberto Bolao's short story "Enrique Martin".
Power is, through his two main characters, commenting on the loneliness and struggles of the creative process.
Robert's faith in the novelist's cloak of invisibility disappears when he thinks that he is being followed and especially after a call, which turns out to be false, that his wife has been badly injured in a car crash.
Now that Patrick has fled Berlin, will Robert's ownership of the Vanyashin story become too dangerous to tell, even fictionally?
The world of shadows close in at the end of a clever, and structurally intriguing, debut novel.