Chris Else: The Beetle in the box - A love story

By PENELOPE BIEDER*

If there are secrets and lies crackling and murmuring beneath the facades of even the most ordinary lives, does that mean that the very rich have quantifiably more to hide?

Jack Collingham, a 26-year-old philosophy graduate, takes a seemingly straightforward position as chauffeur and assistant to a wealthy couple, ruthless businessman Brik Casturian and his younger, stunningly beautiful wife Theresa.

In a passive, fatalistic manner, Jack is trying to sort out what he really wants to make of his life.

"It's not a want of intellect that makes a fool of him. It's his lack of drive and ambition. He doesn't care. As long as he has enough to eat and a bed to sleep in, he counts himself happy. How far are you going to get with an attitude like that?"

But in the course of this elegant and restrained novel, we learn that there is much more, and much that is dark in Jack's past, and in his employers' too.

This is a cool, at times decidedly chilly, love story but its understatement is irresistible.

The happy-go-lucky chap we met on page one does not exist: Jack's mind is in turmoil, seething with activity - the beetle in the box - while outwardly he remains infuriatingly passive.

He allows himself to be drawn into the strange world of the Casturians, who are at once demanding and charming, menacing and passionate.

Intertwined with wry philosophical and mathematical treatises that are almost brief enough not to interfere but do, eventually, irritate, is a story that is hard to put down.

But did the author so lack belief in a good story that he had to embroider it with repeated choruses on ethics and reason?

Chris Else has set this contemporary tale, his third novel, in rural New Zealand. It could as easily be England or North America because, while the mansion and gardens where most of the action takes place are closely described, place is far less important than the extraordinary situations the characters find themselves in and extricate themselves from.

There is much to enjoy in Else's wit which is drier than Tio Pepe's finest: "Jack loves to reason, but he puts his brain to no good use at all. He's a seeker after truth, the Absolute Truth, and that's a lost cause, as we all know."

Else may well tease us like this but the reader understands that the tedious job of chauffeuring provides Jack with the perfect environment for a great deal of unsettling thinking and longing (and listening in to cellphone conversations). While he wonders whether rationality is the pursuit of virtue, it is the helpings of pure vice that make this story sing.

Vintage

$24.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.