Losing the Plot by
Paul Wheeler
pbk out October 98
(Gollancz)
at £9.99
Hurrah for the truly adult thriller. Adult in the sense of 'grown-up', though sex in the sense of 'adult' is there all right, necessary to the plot, but with more sober, untitillating descriptive writing than you get in any of the usual run of books playing up to that voyeuristic streak that lurks in most of us. Paul Wheeler's protagonist, Alan Tate, is an unusual hero, a man of fifty, intelligent, nicely sophisticated (He sees a VDU rippling with columns of figures and thinks 'formal geometric patterns like a mobile Bridget Riley') and credibly bad at being macho.
A screenwriter pretty well past his sell-by date and just divorced, Tate is soon lured into a huge and immensely complicated financial scam. For the rest of the book he attempts to wriggle out of trouble, almost entirely by remembering bits of either his own film scripts or those of real writers, a device that gives the book a continuous stream of scintillating and endearingly charming jokes as we weave our way in and out of the Groucho, smart London hotels, dubious London flats. And at the end, behold, our aging, not terribly efficient, not particularly courageous hero triumphs and falls back into the now welcoming arms of his ex. As we want him to. As it is right that he should.
