How to Make a Bomb (2024)
Why this one?
This was an ARC from Head of Zeus via Netgalley (many thanks!)
This one was an easy choice as I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Thomson, with particular highlights being the dystopian Divided Kingdom (2005) and the more recent (and wildly different) Never Anyone But You.
Rupert Thomson (1955- ; active c. 1976- ) was born in Eastbourne, in southern England. He lost his mother at a young age and subsequently attended Christ's Hospital, a charitable boarding school. While there, he developed an interest in poetry and began writing himself. He later studied Medieval History and Political Philosophy at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he had poems published in several magazines.
Following university, he traveled extensively in North America, and spent time living in Athens, before taking a role as an advertising copywriter in London. After four years he gave this up to devote himself to creative writing, initially living in Italy before moving around through the 80s, with spells in West Berlin, New York and Tokyo. In this period he wrote his debut novel Dreams of Leaving, which was eventually published by Bloomsbury in 1987.
His subsequent works have included The Insult (1996), which was listed by David Bowie as one of his top 100 reads, and the unsettling The Book of Revelation (1999), which as well as being my own introduction to Thomson's work, was adapted as a film in 2006 by Ana Kokkinos. 2009's Death of a Murderer centres on Moors murderer Myra Hindley and was shortlisted for the Costa prize. In 2010 he published the memoir This Party's Got to Stop, and in 2020 published a novel (NVK) under the pseudonym Temple Drake. In recent years he has continued to regularly put out acclaimed novels, including Katherine Carlyle (2015), Never Anyone But You (2018) and Barcelona Dreaming (2021). Despite consistent critical acclaim, he has yet to win any literary prize for his fiction.
Thoughts, etc.
How to Make a Bomb was initially published last year in the US under the somewhat less provocative title Dartmouth Park. It’s a short novel, written in a sparse poetic style, eschewing paragraphs in favour of short sentences with line breaks and limited punctuation. Its focus is the fifty-year-old London-based historian Philip Notman, who is thrown into a deep personal crisis following a trip to a conference in Bergen. On his return he begins to struggle to pick up with his everyday life, and abandons his wife and (adult) son to head off in search of… something. Initially it seems that that something may be an affair, with the captivating Ines, who he met at the Bergen conference and initially seeks out in Cadiz. Yet relatively soon he is on the move again, this time to Crete to spend time in the dilapidated house of an older couple he helped out in Spain. He arrives seeking fulfillment of a different kind, away from the noise of modern life, and is further tempted by the allure of religion on a visit to a monastery. When all of this ultimately fails to resolve his issues, he heads back to London with a new sense of purpose, and a rather disturbing mission.
This is a typically beautifully written and intriguing novel from Thomson. In its early phases it seems (formal presentation aside) like a relatively conventional, if beguiling, account of a man’s midlife crisis, with the expectation that Philip will find (or at least seek to find) some form of fulfillment in the arms of an alluring ‘other woman’. Its title hangs over this reading though, offering a sense that there’s more to this than meets the eye (something that I think significantly increases the tension and stakes of these early pages, and would have been missed if the UK publishers had gone with the US titling). Regardless, I enjoyed these pages a lot, in spite of their seemingly conventional themes. Ines is so magnetically rendered (in relatively few words) that it comes as a shock to us (much as it does to her) when Philip blurts out that he ‘doesn’t want anything from her’. We also learn about Philip’s initial ‘courting’ of his now-abandoned wife Anya, a hard-fought chase he won (against a soldier, no less, a fact which still seems to make him rather smug!) and a further source of intrigue for the reader, who is left to wonder what exactly it is that draws these captivating female characters to the perpetually unsatisfied (and rather drab seeming) Mr Notman, and what exactly is the source of his despair at his apparently charmed life.
Like the last advance novel I covered, Caledonian Road, this book features a middle-aged member of London’s academic class having some sort of existential crisis. While far less ‘on the nose’ (at least for the most part) than O’Hagan’s book, How to Make a Bomb is again obviously focused on the role of the modern man in a changing world. In this case, Notman (a deliberately apposite name, and not just for the punning fun it offers late in the novel) develops a sense of alienation, which he ultimately pins down as (a fairly nebulously defined) rejection of the capitalist system but seems also to lie in a form of emasculation. His travels in the book amount to a kind of quest to find a new sense of purpose (as a man?), though none of his actions give him the redemption he seems to be seeking. Through the novel he demonstrates random acts of kindness (helping an elderly man after a fall, contributing to putting out a wildfire in Crete, and supporting a homeless girl in London) yet despite some positive impact, he remains unfulfilled and seems determined to find ever-wilder (yet still somehow highly cliched) solutions to his problems, culminating in the book’s ambiguous and somewhat silly conclusion, which does (or perhaps does not) deliver on the book’s new title. At a couple of points in the book, Don Quixote is evoked, and Notman certainly does at points seem like a man tilting at windmills.
It’s a book that asks many more questions than it answers, mostly pivoting around our interpretation of its central character. He’s not entirely unsympathetic, and his eventual stated belief system, while entirely unoriginal, does have merit in its questioning of the evident ills of late capitalism. Yet at the same time, he’s obviously a version of the very archetypal mid-life-crisis-man, who has abandoned both his cushy life and his attendant responsibilities to go off in search of some sort of ‘meaning’. At many points he demonstrates good intentions but he’s almost entirely blind to the impact of his actions on other people. He lives more in his imagination than reality, with increasingly long sections devoted to his projections of what he thinks likely to happen as a result of his decisions - almost all focused on the impact on him rather than on others. These challenges of interpretation are briefly touched on in the novel’s final pages, which while more dramatic and action-packed than the rest of the novel, are ultimately a little bit of a disappointment. We’re left pondering not only what to make of the strange ‘civilisation sick’ Notman, but also questioning the reality of some of the events he has previously presented to us as fact.
Score
8
Overall, it’s a small book which asks some very big questions. It’s for the most part masterfully written and is a compelling read throughout. Its ending takes things in surprising and in some senses unsatisfactory directions, but it’s still a worthy addition to a great (and still underrated) writer’s extensive and varied catalogue.
Next up
A little dip into non-fiction! I’m experimenting with supplementing my ‘regular reading’ of fiction (where I’m wedded to actively reading the word on the page) with using audiobooks to delve into some non-fiction, which I’ve been neglecting of late.
