The Armed Man

Or, through London life by minicab

Armadillo by William Boyd

Lorimer Black, not quite young, not completely handsome, not quite who he claims to be, arrives at a work appointment and discovers that Mr Dupree, the man he wished to interview for insurance purposes, has hanged himself in anticipation.

Naturally, this is not an ordinary day. A rough day at the office, that one. A departure from the norm. But, despite Black’s attempts to keep his life carefully ordered, chaos keeps seeping in.

We take stock of Black. His strange, arms-length personal life — one more impersonal than personal — is upended by a romantic obsession sparked by the chance glimpse of a pretty face. His home — an autistic fortress of cleanliness and order, containing a few antique helmets which Black likes to collect and to parlay — is invaded by a series of almost Withnail and I style dossers and wasters. His job, in adjudicating insurance claims and minimising on clients’ behalf the payment of policies, is derailed by a strange fire in one of the properties his company’s parent recklessly overinsured. And Black finds himself increasingly drawn into feuds with builders, feuds with jugglers, feuds with insurance brokers and property tycoons.

Black cares a lot about his job and believes himself to be good at it. He keeps minutely changing his appearance before every meeting for the one per cent of his interlocutors who might notice; he studies his targets like a paranoid or an interrogator for subtle cues to their thoughts. He is often many minutes — on one occasion, days — early for a meeting, happy to wait.

He has scripts ready for when they threaten him — whole arsenals in theory ready to counterpunch any petty attempts at revenge and retribution — weapons he would rather not use.

One of Black’s few friends is his downstairs neighbour, a titled woman cheerfully approaching the end at eighty-eight, but a little concerned as to who might look after her dog in the event. Another friend is a scientist, obsessed with lucid dreaming and with some fairly nutty theories about it, who only knows Black and appears to care about him because of Black’s fascinating, irregular insomnia. Insomnia and REM dreams that the scientist is eager, quite naturally, to study.

And problems with the family. Because Black is not his real name. Nor is Lorimer: in fact, he’s Milo, itself a shortening of a Transnistrian name, allegedly. Black’s family runs a minicab firm and a few other lower-rent businesses from a great house-compound, Black’s childhood home, in which many of them — including Black’s ailing, immobile father — still live.

Whenever Black visits his family, he is hustled for money by his brother and sisters, is manipulated by mother and grandmother, and is saddened beyond words by the condition of his father. Life being what it is.

And that’s all true before things start to go wrong. As, of course, it is inevitable that they surely will.

Compared to the Boyd of the 2020s, I would say that Armadillo appears a little denser, a little more as if the author is striving for effect.

The Gabriel Dax books, Restless, Ordinary Thunderstorms, the Bond book, Solo — these are more genre. They’re lighter, read quicker. In the whole life novels — Any Human Heart, The New Confessions, Sweet Caress, The Romantic, Love Is Blind — there is more of an attempt at summing up human existence, the random nature of events, the pointlessness of living if not for a love or for pleasure or for the hell of it all. Armadillo is clearly in the latter category. It seems, although it is more like Boyd’s early comic novels in form, on occasion, to have an implied seriousness that it does not always wear lightly enough, to my taste.

We see Black as he scuttles across London in minicabs, in his own Toyota — vandalised, burnt and finally rusting — by Tube and by bus and by taxi. It is picaresque, meant to be. And things happen to Black, as the book approaches its turbulent conclusions, in the bizarre and unexpected ways that things befall, for instance, a character in Smollett or perhaps, if we are generous to Boyd, the early Dickens of Pickwick.

I quite enjoy one of the conceits of this book, which is that Black is compiling a commonplace book, a kind of literary artefact like Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, as he goes. These are bits and pieces, fragments of his reading, little historical facts he has collected — real or imagined — snatches of conversation. Memories, dreams, transformative events from Black’s bitter past, his deepest fears.

Black’s work is The Book of Transfiguration. How is the transfiguring taking place? Why? The reader occasionally wonders.

There are several themes here to which Boyd alludes often, in other books: the inherent chaos of human affairs; the injudicious impulsiveness of matters of the heart; the clear fact that none of us can, really, control our lives.

And the other fact, more mundane, more ordinary, that all of human society is filled with large, mostly bipedal ants, swarming all over the place, going to and from their jobs, being disappointed by their schooling, their families, their friends, their lives. All of them trying to live for a brief time in some private state of excitement or contentment or romance or rest or ecstasy. I believe we have heard that one before.

I read this one straight through in a day, today, so I cannot say it was a difficult, chin-stroking book. I enjoyed the movement of the plot, especially as the book approached several false but convincing enough climaxes towards the end. It goes along; some of the characters are annoying but enough of them interest this reader. I’m not so interested in the conclusions drawn about sleep, life and death, love and fate and chance, however. It’s not always for me, even if it is about me, about all readers, in some abstract way or other too tendentious for me to consider or to dispute.