Let the Bad Times Roll

Caroline is rich and beautiful and rather older than her brother Daniel who is also rich and beautiful but charismatic with it. Caroline is not charismatic, she is intelligent and basically reliable but with a strong maternal streak that results in an obsession with her brother’s vulnerability. She is something between a Rottweiler and a doting mum, the last currently in evidence as she shops in artisan bakeries and classy fishmongers selecting the delicacies for a sumptuous party. It’s Daniel’s thirtieth birthday and she has invited his three closest friends to feast with them in her London flat.

This novel is a jumble in time and space: forward, back, lateral, but the continuity is seamless, sometimes startling, always opportune. For instance, as Caroline prepares for the party the phone rings and a chapter ends. The next page starts a week later: same place but another party. The first guest finds Caroline distraught and the fridge full of rotting food. As the other friends appear they are joined by a dark stranger introduced as a psychic. Only now does Caroline inform the company (and the reader) of the content of that phone call that had resulted in her cancellation of the birthday dinner followed by a week of frantic transatlantic telephoning.

Daniel’s passport and his bloodstained shirt had been found in a swamp close to New Orleans. No body had been discovered but that was to be expected in a bayou infested with alligators. The police had interviewed Daniel’s girl-friend, Selina, a psychic from London who was rooming with him at a backpackers’ hostel in the city. She was no help; he had gone out one evening and not come back.

Initially Caroline was in denial. She knew her brother; this was not Daniel. His passport had been stolen. He was wealthy; he had his own money, he had access to their joint account; his milieu was 5-star hotels, gourmet food and wines, he always wore black. The shirt found in the swamp was a cheesecloth rag - and what would he be doing, a sceptic, shacking up with a psychic in a cheap hostel? Which was how she came to invite that same psychic to this party: the woman is here to answer questions.

It doesn’t work. As soon as her credentials are queried (she makes a living by tarot readings) Selina starts to probe the questioners seeming to know something of their relationship with Daniel, asking for more, for elucidation. It’s obvious that she has met him, spent time with him, but she, too, is puzzled. She’s fascinated by some shaded event at his university, by his involvement with a rock band, by the force that drove his wild progress through the bars of downtown New Orleans. In unravelling his history it appears that Selina is as anxious to know what makes Daniel tick as his sister is to discover how he came to be alone in a swamp in a far country.

As the sky darkens and the lights come on in London a drama is played out for the reader, the action conveyed in a flat narrative and pedestrian dialogue, a style that’s a foil for the sudden shocking events recounted as we are transported: switched by a sentence or even a phrase from the debris of the dinner table and an ill-advised séance to the gaudy glamour of New Orleans and beyond. We are back in a university library ten years ago, with that rock band on tour: musicians, groupies, entrepreneurs…. Gaps are filled and the pace quickens; there are ephemeral moments in San Francisco, Hollywood, a lost gas station in the Mojave desert. It becomes  a travelogue, a road movie; you go with the flow, enthralled.

It’s the characters that carry it; for all the emphasis on drink and drugs and gorgeous food, of careless casual sex, for all the hints of obscenity behind the glamour, the principals are portrayed with a shining power that stirs a sense of empathy despite the indulgence and the waste. For these are lost people, who never quite made it, and Alice Slater has flayed them to the bone while producing an excellent mystery and the coldest psychopath yet.