UNDER RADAR

A slender tale that begins like one of Tolkin’s trademark black comedies (The Player, 1988; Among the Dead, 1993) before veering off into a fable far riskier.

Dragged on a Jamaican holiday by his wife, Tom Levy can’t relax. Instead of settling into the apartment-style hotel Rosalie has chosen as suitable for their daughters Perri, 9, and Alma, 4, he amuses himself by recalling his criminal past (he’d taken part in an insurance scam years ago) and embroidering his favorite story (his erotic adventures with a female stranger). Then the stranger arrives in the person of Debra Seckler, who he’s convinced “was everything he had ever needed from a stranger.” Instead of initiating an affair with her, however, Tom takes an instant dislike to her husband Barry, especially after he encourages little Alma to dance in a way Tom finds demeaning, and after luxuriating in fantasies of Barry’s violent death, kills him in a setting that practically guarantees the murder will be caught on videotape. This story, which might well have stood alone, is only a prelude to a sea change in Tom’s life. Tried and convicted, he spends seven years in Spanish Town Prison, utterly forsworn by Rosalie, before awakening one day to the realization that he has no recollection of how long he’s been there or how his hair came to turn white. His fellow inmates tell him that he’d stopped talking for years after the condemned prisoner placed next to him had whispered some secret story into his ear. At length, Tom recalls the story—its heart a conflict between a Catholic missionary and a goddess worshipper—cueing a series of increasingly problematic tales, his own and those of others, that eventually close his life’s journey in a neatly unresolved circle.

Scheherezade without the urgent threat of death: an enigmatic yet haunting tribute to the power of storytelling.