On the top floor of a converted warehouse, the restaurant is a discreet venue, well away from the established haunts of the political power brokers and the press. The large windows overlook the river on one side and a strangely shaped late-modernist masterpiece made out of glass and steel on the other. The light is aggressively grey yet slick, as if everything it touches is in the process of being weaponised.
Thus begins a strange novel, yet one that seems oddly familiar in so many of its themes and characters. Every Place Unlike Home is the story of a deeply unpleasant Tory politician facing a massive crisis as his sordid past threatens to destroy his career. Given that, you might expect it to be told in a fairly hard-boiled, almost journalistic fashion. But it is not. Instead, this book's antecedents seem to be - in no particular order - Robert Aickman's strange tales, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, a light seasoning of Kafka, and perhaps a dash of Michael Frayn's Sweet Dreams. At least, that is your humble reviewer's take. Others, and especially the author, may disagree.
When I first received this review copy I felt more than a little dismay. As I get older I find it harder to read longer works. Attention spans are shortening and getting old doesn't help. But as I began to read I found myself drawn into the shadowy world of Stephen Otterway, a sadist, snob, liar, and rising star of the Conservative Party. HIs meeting with Wren, one of many grotesque yet believable characters, sets the ball rolling. Does Otterway have any dirty laundry in his past that could cause problems if he is given a junior ministerial role? Oh no, of course not.
With that blatant lie, Otterway's odyssey begins. He must try to cover up a scandal that led to a young man's suicide. Unscrupulous, incapable of love or friendship, and a bully by nature, Otterway has left a trail of damaged lives and betrayed people. He has an ex-wife whom he bribed to keep quiet about his horrendous sexual sadism. The mother of the boy he bullied mercilessly at an obscure boarding school is seldom far away. And then there is the psychiatrist who recorded their therapy sessions thirty years earlier. Otterway can't let those tapes fall into the wrong hands.
This grubby quest takes Otterway to the Welsh Marches and an obscure town called Hye. It is here that his reality starts to come unglued, as our villain is constantly balked in his attempts to get the tapes and paper files. What is he to make of the sound of trains in the distance when Hye has not had rail service in decades? How can he keep getting lost, as if the town constantly reconstructs itself when he's not looking? And who is the Knit-wit, a very rude man in a colourful woollen hat, who torments him intermittently?
The novel alternates between past and present, with its descriptions of boarding school life being particularly convincing i.e. grim. Wilkinson deftly ushers us towards the 'incident' that Otterway is desperate to erase from his personal history, while his every move seems to make discovery and scandal more likely. Otterway is a familiar character, clearly owing something to chancers like Johnson and Farage. It is precisely his belief in his own exceptional qualities that makes his eventual fate inevitable.
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