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Dream Weasels >> In Armadillo, William Boyd tries to escape our "small bastard world" by JULIET WATERS
I regret this after finishing William Boyd's latest novel, Armadillo, because I'm convinced that Boyd's imagination must have been developed though some rigorous form of dream training. A vision this incisive, profound, hilarious and dark has to have some kind of explanation beyond pure talent. This occurred to me because Armadillo's central character, Lorimer Black, is a research subject at a place in London called the Lucid Dream Institute. A chronic insomniac, his brain waves are monitored to see if lucid dreaming might cure him of whatever is keeping him awake. But in the real world, Black's life seems to be a non-stop lucid nightmare. In the first paragraph, Black shows up for a routine business appointment and discovers a hanged man. And things don't seem to improve much. Black is a "loss adjuster." His job is to assess how much compensation a company or individual gets on an insurance claim, and he's one of the elite. He has a talent for sniffing the false rage that erupts after a bogus accident, which Boyd describes with his talent for emotional detail: "It is the quality of the rage that gives them away... something about the pitch and tone of an indifferent liar's rage rings false, troubles the inner ear like the whine of a mosquito in a darkened bedroom--unmistakable, unerringly disturbing." It could be that Black developed his talent from his family, a long line of Romanian gypsies, originally called Blocj. But what's important is that as an elite loss adjuster, Black has a purpose in the world, according to one of his colleagues, George Hogg. "We had a vital role to play: we were the people who reminded all the others that nothing in this world is truly certain, we were the rogue element, the unstable factor in the ostensibly stable world of insurance. When we do our adjustments of loss we frustrate and negate all the bland promises of insurance. We act out, in our small way, one of the great unbending principles of life: nothing is sure, nothing is certain, nothing is risk-free, nothing is fully covered, nothing is forever. It is a noble calling..." Unfortunately, the people who are having their loss adjusted don't tend to see it that way and Black's life is filled with the surreal never-ending danger of one who goes about his daily life incurring the hatred of weasels. The only hope Black has is an obsessive love for an actress, Flavia Malinverno. But even when he scores a date with her, she turns up with her husband, Noon. Just when things threaten to become slapstick ("I don't think you've ever met Noon, have you Lorimer?"...."No. Hi, Noon"), Boyd cuts to an observation about life that is deeply cynical, yet also quite moving, even when it threatens to become bland. Says Hogg, "The problem for people like you--and people like me--occurs when you find yourself, a decent person, having to live and work in the world full of bastards. That can be difficult. Everywhere you look, the world seems a sink and there seems to be only two options for survival--become a bastard yourself or surrender to despair. But that's only because you're in your small bastard world. Outside in the wider world, the real world, there are plenty of decent folk and it's run along lines that decent folk can understand, by and large... Move away, change your point of view and you'll see it's not all dark. You'll see the good in the world. It helps." Whether Black chooses to believe this or not is a central question in this novel. But the ending is no less satisfying than the process by which he gets there. And while some novels are worth rereading, every once in a while you get one that's almost worth memorizing. Armadillo, I suspect, will probably remain on my bedside table for a long while. Armadillo by William Boyd Viking, hc, 310 pp, $32
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I used to experiment with lucid dreaming, which are dreams the dreamer can control and influence. It took me a month, but eventually I taught myself to fly. Then one night I lost control and flew into a huge nuclear mushroom cloud. When I emerged, my part in the dream was suddenly being played by Kevin Bacon. This was years before anyone had advanced the theory that Kevin was six degrees of separation from just about everyone in the world. Nevertheless, it freaked me out and I stopped.