Anything for a quiet life

Jim, Crace’s latest novel, All That Follows, marks a deliberate change from past form.

Jim, Crace’s latest novel, All That Fol lows, marks a deliberate change from past form. Gone are the musical, metaphorical sentences and the fanciful narratives, and in come realism, character and dialogue. It’s not all completely new, in that the novel is set partly in 2024, and partly in Bush’s Texas in 2006; but then again the 2024 of this novel is merely the present day with even more governmental nannying and some unlikely-sounding ‘telescreens’ (which sound like a view of the future as conceived in the 1950s).

The protagonist is Leonard Lessing — one cannot call him ‘hero’, for reasons that will become clear — an indecisive and timid Englishman who turns 50 during the novel. Leonard is a well-regarded saxophonist currently taking an injury-enforced break. While feted for his avant-garde bravery in front of an audience, however, he is a mouse in real life. Unfortunately, when he sees the face of a hostage-taker on television he recognises an old friend, Maxie, with whom he was briefly political and idealistic two decades earlier — although Leonard’s newly found idealism at that time was principally driven by his passion for Maxie’s girlfriend.

Leonard must decide whether to become involved in the situation. At first, when he meets Maxie’s estranged teenage daughter, he agrees to join in with her idea of faking her kidnap so that her father will, in his turn, agree to release his own hostages. However, he backs down from this, and there follows a good deal of hand-wringing, and much turbulence between Leonard and his wife, Francine, who is frustrated at her husband’s spinelessness and actually quite keen to become embroiled in trouble.