You can run, but you can’t hide

Stuart Evers’ debut short-story collection was called Ten Stories About Smoking, but even readers who are aware of this might be astonished by the multitude of burning cigarettes in his first novel, If This is Home. His characters smoke constantly, as if they are in the Forties film noir Out of the Past, where Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer are apparently incapable of breathing except through cigarette filters.

Evers’ novel, also in common with Out of the Past, deals with grim secrets and failed personal reinvention. When Mark Wilkinson flees England and his non-descript northern town for New York City he seems at first to be leaving only the scraps of a misspent youth behind. He makes one close friend in New York and eventually changes his name to Josef Novak. A whole new identity is constructed on a notepad. We are unsure why, except that Mark seems disconnected somehow, possibly callous or even crazy. His story is told in the first person, but we don’t feel the usual invasive privileges. For all we know he could be another Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.

The two friends move to Las Vegas and start a business that aims to comfort the rich, a hedonistic hideout in the desert. Grandly titled the Valhalla, it is reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s highrises and holiday resorts. Its atrium is ‘modelled on the set design for a film about Atlantis that had never been shot’.  An underfloor pond filled with exotic fish adds the kind of tackiness that magnetises the rich, and the east wing, comprising 55 floors — where the restaurants and prostitutes reside — is mostly empty.

‘No one had the imagination to populate such places,’ we are told; ‘it was the impression that was important, the suggestion that only a closed, locked door could imply.’