The Singer's Gun
By Emily St. John Mandel, Unbridled Books, 288 pages, $28.95
Anton Waker, the mysterious protagonist of Emily St. John Mandel's second novel, The Singer's Gun, spends the better part of the book waiting. Waiting for what? That's the source of this thinking person's thriller's suspense, the primary question among several posed in the novel's opening pages that is left unanswered - by turns teasingly, cleverly, tediously - before the many pasts that make up the bulk of the book catch up to the present. In the meantime, Anton waits.
And as Anton waits, so do we. While the hold-up is intentional (this is a novel of multiple flashbacks and filled-in holes), it has the unwanted side effect of feeling like sitting at the airport gate and learning your flight has been delayed. And then, after a while, you learn it's been delayed again.
But at least the flight isn't cancelled in this case, and The Singer's Gun eventually gets off the ground. As airlines know (and count on), most travellers are willing to forgive prolonged departures as long as the arrival goes well.
So where does The Singer's Gun take us? Geographically, the island of Ischia, where Anton stays on after the end of his numbed honeymoon, rereading the International Herald Tribune in cafes during the day and gazing out at the Tyrrhenian Sea at night. But in literary terms, this is Graham Greeneland.
The quiet suspense, the suspicions of double agency, the adulterous sex, the brooding characters winding up to a moment of (likely disastrous) decisive action - Greene's thrillers were never about thrills, but decision-making. He was the master of the inactive action novel: stories of men spending a lot of time trying to figure out what to do (or what God would have them do) with the messes they'd gotten themselves into, and then - often for the most tragically honourable of reasons - making an even bigger mess of things.
This is the tradition The Singer's Gun plays with, and despite its tentative mentions of 9/11 and contemporary office politics, it feels slightly anachronistic as a result, a kind of time-capsule noir. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it's a storytelling strategy that yields solid if modest pleasures, along with some well-earned observations about the costs of, as Anton's father puts it, making "things happen for yourself."
What Anton makes happen for himself is joining his cousin, Aria, in selling fake passports and visas to illegals living (or wishing to live) in the United States. He is a reluctant fraud artist, an essentially decent man born into a family of self-justifying criminals. Wishing for a more normal life, he pulls off one more bit of fakery - padding his resume with a bogus Harvard degree - and gets a job with a water-purification company. But impurities run too deep in Anton's past, and as with all attempts to "go straight" in the noir universe, the lies you've told will be discovered in time. More than this, the longer you've benefited from falsehood, the nastier the payback. In Greene's novels, this was presented as Catholic guilt. But it's really just guilt.
Adding to Anton's burden on the bad-conscience front is his affair with Elena, his secretary originally from Inuvik (yes, there is a CanCon connection here, albeit of a rather improbable sort) whom he met when he sold her false identification. Sophie, Anton's fiancée, would not be happy to learn of his Arctic girlfriend. But she'd be even less pleased with his history as a forger and phony Harvard man. This is how Aria blackmails him into going to Ischia for one last job: Do it, or I'll tell your wife-to-be the truth. So Anton goes to the island. And waits.
While the concluding chapters of The Singer's Gun contain few real surprises, Mandel's prose remains sturdy and lean throughout. The restraint shown in the action department (another indication of the old-fashioned) won't satisfy those who demand more visceral thrills, but it supports the novel's commitments to the quieter aspects of character over the pull of a gut-punching or sparklingly original plot. And that's fine. As Graham Greene proved, a perfectly satisfying entertainment can be wrought from waiting for the past to catch up with you. Sometimes, it's enough for a reader to wish that, this time, our good bad guy will get away with it.
Andrew Pyper's most recent book is The Killing Circle, which was selected a Notable Crime Novel of the Year by The New York Times.