Glover's Mistake [Paperback]

 

 

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Set in contemporary London this novel is essentially about deceit and betrayal and the sly manipulations of one disaffected man, determined to exact revenge on his flat mate and best friend, a kind of handsome lothario with an early twenties naivety. Although none of the characters in Glover's Mistake are particularly likeable, the novel has a compelling acerbic and cynical quality, where an ill-fated romance between a young man and an older woman is set against the trend setting art world.

The tale begins and ends with obsession. David Pinner is absolutely in thrall to his ex-art teacher, glamorous and beautiful forty-five year old Ruth Marks. Ruth is poised to set the UK art world on fire with her contemporary retrospective here in London - abstract works a sheet of black papyrus four or five meters wide, reflecting her pseudo lesbian/feminist themes. When David reconnects with her at a gallery opening he feels a gut wrenching attraction, the conversation leaving him charged and affected, her seductive aura leaving him feeling drunk and a little engulfed.

A writer and a teacher of English literature, who normally spends his evenings alone, blogging on the Internet, chatting on a forum, and managing his webzine, The Damp Review, his meeting with Ruth plunges him into the real of the urban cultural participant, "engaged in the world, aboard in the dark." Ruth - obviously acclimatized to prosperity at an early age - eats up the attention, at first all too willing to take up David's offer of doing some kind of art project together set in urban settings. But even as Ruth begins the cold shivers of hesitation and David settles into an uncomfortable passivity, Ruth is drawn to James Glover, David's hunky, flat mate and the barman, at David's local pub.

Even in his early 20's Glover has an undeniable elegance and sex appeal, his physique nothing but tendon and muscle. His easy comicality framed around his apparent naivety. He might share the same flat with David and enjoy the spurts of their jocular and easygoing friendship, but the fiercely intellectual James lives in an entirely different universe. Ironically it is Glover who makes David feel masculine, pumping up his frail manly ego, this once ugly duckling who feels he has grown into "a penguin, a dodo and a booby."

Laird's acerbic and caustic novel is framed around the cynical maneuverings of these three personalities with their little hierarchy of ids and egos and superegos. At first all of them hitting it off An edge of banter, David and Glover becoming her wayward boys, cocky mocking and sly, all three sharing intimate trips to the theatre, art house cinema, gallery exhibitions and dinners. It doesn't take long, however for James to develop an irritating sense of being overlooked when Ruth starts showering attentions on Glover. Soon to become a negligible thing. an invisible man, James he feels them both pulling away from his texts and messages, seldom eliciting replies, their affair only a hint of the passion, the marital promises, and the ultimate betrayal to come.

As James sets about clandestinely sabotaging the fledging relationship, Nick Laird's London is laid out like a postcard, like its own advertisement: the Millennium Wheel, Big Ben, Tower bridge, the pyramid top of Canary Warf. As this story unfurls just like Ruth's art installations, the reader is left appalled at Andrew, Ruth's and Glover's stunning self-involvement and rapacious shallowness and the fragments of the relationship, the particles and fibers of which are eventually driven and dispersed by David. Poor David is certainly at a loss among these people, mostly characterized by the pretentious Ruth, with their casual manners and ironic patter, their insinuation that surface is depth and that appearance is content. In the end, these are "people who pick other people up and examine them and set them down and laugh." Laird's novel is as dense, rich and as detailed as David's over-worked mind and his skewered sense of devotion. The banality of love and the power of hate along with what passes for love in a threesome gone horribly wrong is the at core of Glover's Mistake where everyone you meet is wearing some disguise and where "the lover is the best liar of the lot." Mike Leonard July 09.

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