Armadillo (Penguin Street Art) - Softcover

Boyd, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241965462 ISBN 13: 9780241965467

Publisher: Penguin, 2013

Synopsis

'A young man not much over thirty, tall with ink-dark hair and a serious-looking, fine-featured but pallid face, went to keep a business appointment and discovered a hanged man'

Lorimer Black - young, good-looking, but with a somewhat troubled expression - does not understand why his world is being torn apart, though he does know that for the most part it is made up of bluster and hypocrisy. His business, trying to keep insurance companies from paying out the money they've promised, is a con game run with the protection of the law. One winter's morning, Lorimer goes to keep a perfectly routine business appointment and finds a hanged man. A bad start to the day, by any standards, and an ominous portent of things to come.

PENGUIN STREET ART: Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd / Armadillo by William Boyd/ And The Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave / What a Carve Up by Jonathan Coe/ Americana by Don DeLillo/ Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris/ The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid/ The Believers by Zoe Heller/ How to Be Good by Nick Hornby/ Lights out for the Territory by Iain Sinclair

About this title

Review:

Lorimer Black may suffer from a serious sleep disorder and an obsession with the labyrinths of the British class system, but Armadillo's peculiar protagonist is the star insurance adjuster of London's Fortress Sure PLC, unkindly known as the Fort. At the very start of William Boyd's noir-ish seventh novel, however, things take a decided swerve for the worse. On a bleak January morning one of his cases has apparently chosen to kill himself rather than talk: "Mr. Dupree was simultaneously the first dead person he had encountered in his life, his first suicide and his first hanged man and Lorimer found this congruence of firsts deceptively troubling."

Soon our hero, who himself has a lot to hide, finds himself threatened by a dodgy type whose loss he has adjusted way down and embroiled with the beautiful married actress Flavia Malinverno. "People who've lost something, they call on you to adjust it, make the loss less hard to bear? As if their lives are broken in some way and they call on you to fix it," Flavia dippily wonders. Lorimer also has his car torched and instantly goes from an object of affection to one of deep suspicion at the Fort. Then there is another case, the small matter of the rock star who may or may not be faking the Devil he claims is sitting on his left shoulder.

Needless to say, Lorimer is "becoming fed up with this role of fall guy for other people's woes." Boyd adds a deep layer of psychological heft and a lighter level of humour to this thinking-person's thriller by exploring Lorimer's manifold personal and social fears. This is a man who desperately collects ancient helmets even though he knows they offer only "the illusion of protection."

Another of Armadillo's many pleasures: its dose of delicious argot. Should Lorimer "oil" the apparent perpetrator of the Fedora Palace arson before he's oiled himself? Or perhaps he just needs to "put the frighteners" on him. Boyd definitely puts the frighteners on his readers more than once in this cinematically seedy and dazzling literary display. --Kerry Fried, Amazon.com

Review:

A novel that is truly comic, and, like all true comedy, also disturbing (Scotsman)

Marvellously paced and ingeniously plotted. A real page-turner (Observer)

Armadillo doesn't miss a trick. It has depth and resonance which will make you want to read it again . . . zinging readability (Mail on Sunday)

A joy to read: east to get into, addictively plotted and beautifully written (Daily Mail)

As entertaining and as thought-provoking as anything Boyd has ever written (Daily Telegraph)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0241965462
• ISBN 13: 9780241965467
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384