Book review: The Escape

Published on Thursday 30 July 2009 14:08

The Escape by Adam Thirlwell Jonathan Cape, 336pp, £16.99

ADAM THIRLWELL'S LATEST novel begins with a man concealing himself in a wardrobe, watching a couple fornicate. That's probably where the parallels with R Kelly's hip-hop soap opera Trapped in the Closet end.

Here, the hidden man does not emerge with a Beretta pistol and Thirlwell, unlike Kelly, does not reinvent his chosen genre, much as you sense he would like to. But there is dubious fun to be had nonetheless.

Raphael Haffner is the man in the wardrobe, a haplessly charming 78-year-old former banker of Lithuanian-Jewish extraction who has grown up in London and had business success in New York. He is "lustful, selfish, vain – an entirely commonplace man", and has come to an Alpine spa town to reclaim the villa his late wife has left him in her will.

It is the last year of the 20th century: "after the era of the spa as a path to health, and before the era of the spa as a path to beauty", in one of Thirlwell's neat turns of phrase.

The couple at it are Zinka – a young Romanian who proves strangely susceptible to Haffner's pitiful charms, later penetrating him with a lubricated candle – and her boyfriend Niko.

Also at the spa are Frau Tummel, a married German 55-year-old who soon has oral sex with Haffner; Viko, a masseur-cum-fixer, who soon gives Haffner a handjob; and later, Haffner's grandson, Benjamin, a hip-hop fan with a strong Jewish faith.

The most vivid presence, however, is Haffner's own parade of memories. Between sexual encounters and inklings of mortality, he reviews his Jewish childhood in north London, war in North Africa, banking triumphs, the affections of his wife, his fondness for Chinese food, jazz, cricket, and so on.

Thirlwell's admiring narrator – apparently a friend 50 years his junior; that is, Thirlwell's age – is keen to stress that our protagonist is a sort of emblem of the 20th century, legendary in his lustfulness. He employs adjectives such as "Haffnerian" to describe his hero's actions.

What is Haffnerian? In one sense, it is a combination of qualities that Haffner recalls being applied to Cole Porter and would like to apply to himself: "Knowledge, Spunk, Individuality, Originality, Realism, Restraint, Rascality, Maturity". He only has a problem with that last one: "The greatest education possible, thought Haffner, would not lead its citizens into an age of responsibility but instead would escalate them to the rarefied heights of dazzling, starlit, spangled immaturity." This is how he has got away with such a carefree approach.

But in a more vivid sense, "Haffnerian" means a bit like a mix of Nabokov's Pnin, Updike's Rabbit and Roth's Portnoy. It means a literary construct that Thirlwell enjoys principally for the way it permits him to allude to – or, rather, rip off – other authors. When Thirlwell goes "Oh Haffner!" perhaps he believes he is being heartfelt and Pushkinian, but it comes across as an undergraduate affectation.

That said, I enjoyed this more than Politics, his supposedly shocking debut – which read like Milan Kundera writing one of those fantasy letters to Penthouse. But The Escape is best when Thirlwell focuses on real life (for which he has an exacting eye). A little time away from academia would do him the power of good.

Oh, and if you haven't already, look up R Kelly's Trapped in the Closet on YouTube.

&#149 Adam Thirwell is at the Edinburgh book festival on 16 August.