One day last week I was visiting one of my favourite blogs, Random Jottings, and found Elaine giving a rave review to this book. It sounded so great that I was desperate to read it, and Elaine was kind enough to send me her copy, which arrived on Saturday. I've been fighting off an irritating virus all week, which has been chasing itself round and round my respiratory system, so I had a good excuse to curl up with this book and read it all in no time.
The Lying Tongue is Andrew Wilson's first novel, but he has written a biography of that great crime writer Patricia Highsmith, and if I say it shows, that is not meant in any way to diminish his achievement here. But certainly there is a touch of Highsmith's extraordinary creation Ripley in Adam, the central figure and narrator of The Lying Tongue, though this is something which only really dawns on the reader gradually. As the novel begins, Adam has just finished an art-history degree in London and, having broken up with his girl-friend, has accepted a job in Venice, teaching English to a sixteen-year-old Italian boy. When he arrives, he finds the job has fallen through, but the boy's parents suggest he might approach an aging English resident of Venice, the writer Gordon Crace, who, they think, may be in need of a secretary/companion. Anxious to stay in the city, where he hopes to write his first novel, Adam makes contact with the reclusive Crace and is soon living in the crumbling palazzo where the writer has lived in total seclusion for more than forty years. Crace's past is something of a mystery -- he has only ever published one, hugely successful, novel, in the 1960s -- and one which Adam is increasingly fascinated by. Indeed, he becomes more and more convinced that the real purpose of his own future will be not his non-starter of a novel but a biography of Crace himself. He returns briefly to England to pursue various researches into his employer's past, a journey which leads him down avenues he certainly could never have anticipated. The denouement, following his return to Venice, is shocking and surprising, as much for Adam as for the reader.
What really sold this novel to me was not so much the plot, though this is undoubtedly exciting and engaging, but more the way in which Adam's character, and elements of his own past, are gradually revealed as he proceeds with his account of his investigations. An apparently attractive, intelligent and rational young man, he proves to have a darker and more disturbing side which increasingly overturns the reader's initial impressions of him. All very skillfully done.
PS As this was a freebie, I'd be happy to pass it on to any fellow blogger who'd like to review it!
