The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe
Viking, $39
This couldn't have been written any other time than now. Set post-financial apocalypse and awash in such things as social networking, it's a darkly comic study of loneliness in the 21st century.
It opens with Maxwell Sim sitting in a Sydney restaurant watching a mother and daughter playing cards at a nearby table and envying the connection. At 48, Maxwell's wife and daughter have left him, his father is distant and, while he has 70 friends on Facebook, he hasn't got a single one to actually talk to. Maxwell is a dullard, the kind of man who likes motorway service stations and is glad that fast-food chains are taking over the world. He's a failure and such a bore that in a comic filibuster on his flight back home to Britain he manages to bore the passenger beside him to death.
Then two things happen. Through a chance meeting Maxwell becomes obsessed with the story of the infamous Donald Crowhurst, a real-life round-the-world yachtsman of the 1960s who faked his voyage, had a mental breakdown and then disappeared. Next, Max is offered a job by an eco-toothbrush company who want him to drive to the furthest reaches of Scotland as part of a brand promotion.
It's as he's driving slowly northwards, revisiting people from his past and developing an unusual connection with his SatNav, that Maxwell's life starts showing disturbing parallels with that of Crowhurst as his mental state deteriorates.
Coe is a devastatingly clever writer. He resists ridiculing the dull and depressed Maxwell, instead telling his story in a sort of deadpan first person alternated with short stories the character finds himself reading that shed light on life. There's a salad of themes to pick through as you go but it's Maxwell's increasingly desperate voice that's so compelling.
Unfortunately rather like yachtsman Crowhurst and the hapless Maxwell himself, Coe steers off course and in the final chapter relies on a writerly contrivance that left me feeling disappointed, even cheated. I'm not going to give away the ending as I think the story worth reading despite it, but the last line pretty much made me want to throw the book across the room.
