Chris Power’s 2021, debut novel came to my attention because I recently interviewed Chris, in his 2025 Booker Prize judge capacity, for a magazine. I try to be polite and conscientious so I thought it behoved me to read A Lonely Man before speaking to its author. I had no idea what to expect. In the event it was a delightful surprise which I admired very much – apart from the ending of which more anon.
Robert, who is an author, lives in Berlin with his wife and two young daughters. They also have a lakeside house in her native Sweden. Places are sensuously evoked in this intriguing novel and it is clear that Chris knows them well.
Robert meets another Brit, Patrick, who is also a writer. Incrementally, during a series of furtive meetings, Patrick, anxious and capricious, tells Robert an extraordinary story about being commissioned to ghost-write the memoir of a Russian oligarch who then dies – officially by suicide but actually under suspicious, hushed-up circumstances. Robert doesn’t really believe a word of it but sees it as a good plot for his new novel which has been proving elusive. Thus, Patrick’s story, as told by Robert who adds fictional detail forms chunks of Chris’s novel. Still with me? In effect it means that A Lonely Man is a story, within a story within a story like a set of Russian dolls. It’s a clever page turner.
The point really, I suppose, is to investigate the nature of truth which isn’t as absolute as it might seem, and perhaps should be, in a world in which people routinely now say “my truth” when they mean “my point of view” or “my interpretation. The word is now often pluralised these days too as in “their truths”. How much truth is there in what Patrick is telling Robert? The reader can see past Robert and begins to suspect that at least some of it might be true. Patrick is very jumpy and moody – and furious when he learns that Robert is “stealing” his story without telling him. There is strong evidence that he is followed on more than one occasion and soon there are some sinister, knowing messages and phone calls.
Finally … well of course I’m not going to spoil the ending for you but we do actually learn, by inference, whether or not Patrick’s story is the fabrication of a clinically disturbed man or whether any of it is true. Or maybe Robert is fantasising as he writes and we are deliberately left to decide for ourselves? Either way It’s all comes to an abrupt stop, and feels like a cop-out by someone who didn’t really know how to conclude his novel. Bit disappointing than, at the last, although I enjoyed it until the final page.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt
