Seasoned Bookmunch regulars will know we always make time for the new Rupert Thomson. We’ve been reading his books since about 1996 when The Insult was published and we’ve read and mostly loved everything since (we didn’t altogether get along with Divided Kingdom in 2005 and his pseudonymous NVK – written under the name Temple Drake – didn’t do much for us either). We mention that here because How To Make a Bomb is another one of those Rupert Thomson’s that we didn’t entirely get along with.
This is the story of Philip Notman, “a celebrated scientist turned historian”, who falls foul of a very modern malaise – finding himself struck by the endless parade of creative decisions that emblazon his world. Every billboard, every building, every announcement, everything he sees forms a palimpsest of decisions made, roads taken, upon which every decision unmade, every road not taken, blinks and blurs away like the tail of a Tralfamadorian. He goes home to his wife but he can’t talk to her about all of the madness fizzing and percolating away in his head.
Thankfully, he has a bit of money and his job is such that he can just take off and so he pays a visit to Cadiz, to meet up with a woman he met at a conference in Bergen (a younger woman who is smart and mysterious and beautiful) and she tries to understand what is going on with him (ah, you think, is this mid-life crisis dressed up as philosophical exploration of modern identity? – no, it isn’t). He makes two friends at the hotel he stays at who generously offer him their home in Crete and so he pops off to Crete, still scratching at the surface of what is wrong with him, trying to come to terms with the fizzing and the percolating in his head and arguably on the trail of a simpler life, perhaps.
While in Crete, he sort of befriends a curmudgeonly Greek called Niko, he periodically talks to his understandably grumpy wife Anya, he wanders about a bit, sits with blokes in a nearby taverna, thinks about some local historical upheaval, finds some tomatoes which he bequeaths to the monks in the local monastery (toying, for a while, with the idea of joining them) and then seems to arrive at a point where he has sort of figured what it is he needs to do. It’s largely during the Crete section of the book that this reader’s attention started to wander. (I kept finding myself thinking, imagine if this poor bloke had to actually work for a living? Had to actually feel the way he’s feeling without being able to just saunter from one lovely location to another. How To Make a Bomb started to feel divorced from the world in which we find ourselves a bit.)
Upon returning to London, he doesn’t head back home, choosing instead to hire out a grotty caravan at the back of a builder’s yard. It is here he writes his Notmanifesto and begins to work on the bomb that the title of the book foreshadows.
“He might be an outcast, a laughingstock, a kind of latter-day Don Quixote, as Ines had pointed out, he might be a source of exasperation and despair to everyone who knew him, but he could have an effect.”
By the time I read this, I felt the exasperation with Philip that his wife Anya felt. Shit or get off the pot, man.
“When people finished reading what he had written, he wanted them to say, Yes, of course.
That’s how it is.”
Which wasn’t how it was for me. How To Make a Bomb took a wee bit too long to get where it was going. And by the climax I didn’t have enough sympathy for Philip to really care whether he went ahead with his plan or not.
Any Cop?: Not our favourite Rupert Thomson if we’re being brutally honest.
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