Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Peter Cameron - Andorra
My admiration for Peter Cameron's 2002 novel The City of Your Final Destination, much of which is set in what seems an imaginary Uruguay, sent me in quest of his previous novel, Andorra. Like Max Frisch's play Andorra, Cameron's Andorra is more metaphor than a real geographic setting. He has lifted Andorra from the Pyrennes and placed it on the Mediterranean (I guess that Monaco is too glitzy for his purposes, and what was the international zone of Tangier until 1956 too Muslim.) Cameron's Andorra is a prosperous place welcoming and incorporating newcomers, including many native speakers of English.
The novel's narrator, Chicagoan Alexander Fox, arrives on the night train from Paris and rents a room in a turret of the Excelsior hotel, the only one in the capital La Plata. On his first foray from his tower, he meets Mrs. Ricky Dent when her large dog goes to her usual table, where he is sitting. She is eager to befriend him, as are some of her elders who have long resided in this place out of time. (When the events are taking place is never made explicit; my interpretation that it is the 1920s or early 30s is based on reference to "Ceylon" and a "gramophone" that seems to wind down.)
Mrs. Reinhardt, the nanagenarian widow of the Excelsior's former owne, and who has lifetime residence, is delighted that Fox is interested in books. A more active pillar of local society, Mrs. Quay, rents him her brother's flat above Ali's coffee shop. Both Mr. and Mrs. Dent want to bed him, and the unmarried daughter of Mrs. Quay is more chastely enamored with him.
Money is no problem for Mr. Fox. He is free of entanglements, his wife and daughter having been killed. He intends to start a new life of leisure in Andorra, recording his impressions in a beautifully crafted journal purchased just before the lunch at which he meets Mrs. Dent. As I read his account of enjoying his new European home, I thought that he was enjoying the kind of life that Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley secured (after he stopped impersonating Dickie Greenleaf; from Ripley's Game onward). Reading on, the analog seemed ever apter.
Menace soon invades the idyll, but to characterize the menace or to summarize the resolution(s) would detract from the great pleasures of the text. The resolution is just, but leaves a couple of loose ends.
Cameron writes dialogue that is a delight to read. Though not how anyone really speaks, it is not artificial in the grand Firbank manner, "only" an improvement on reality-- just as the countries in which he places expatriates are improvements on what exists. He has also created a narrator lacking in pretensions. For instance, Fox notes that "my body had once been lithe and strong and well shaped, but not it looked none of those things," and reports being told "'Good for you' as if I were a child who had done something not very difficult well." The short book is filled with unreliable narrators, each of whose shading what they report of their histories is psychologically plausible. Part Two has an epigram from Emma-- "Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure, seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken" -- that provides fair warning.
Since Penelope Fitzgerald has died and Muriel Spark has slowed down (and E. M. Forster's last novel was published more than eighty years ago), I am delighted to find a relatively young writer as imaginative, compassionate, and convincing as my favorites who, like them, is able to transport me to fraught situations in diverse times and climes. Cameron's other writings (so far) are set in the US. The serialized novel Leap Year is particularly delightful
Weekend was adapted with limited success to the screen. And there are two overlapping collections of short stories: the more easily obtained one is The Half You Don't Know.
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This is a somewhat revised version of a review posted on culturedose. It might have been imported during lean 'n mean III, if I hadn't been playing on the other side (movies). To see what was posted in Tom's writeoff see For other Lean & Mean III entries, see http://www.epinions.com/content_4149256324.
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