Armadillo [Paperback]

a pastiche of the mystery/thriller/crime works of confection we are bombarded with on the shelves of every bookstore. It seems at first that we will be treated to a slow and conventional unravelling of a suicide, an insurance fraud, and other gritty episodes, and that these mundane layers will peel back to suck our hero unwittingly into a seedy underworld of crime that thrives alongside our respectable city professions (surely not!). But actually this teasingly never transpires. This is a good old-fashioned character study and all the better for it. Although these plot episodes serve a purpose - to bring our hero, down on his luck, to his knees, in order that he may change and rise from the ashes (yes, he has to be himself; a hundred thousand therapists applaud) - Boyd must surely be making a point about the fiction industry: here is a book that will sell because of inconsequential devices which, had they been absent, would not have dented the book's literary worth, but sure as hell would've dented its gross product.

And its message is a wonderful message. Think for yourself, and trust your conclusions; and sod society. Milo, of Eastern European extraction, has always strived to fit in. This information is not imparted clumsily - Milo is a confident and successful businessman; the very epitome, in fact, of what success is considered to be in our society. In this role, though, he finds himself colluding, merely by his presence, in all sorts of ubiquitous undesirable elements - sexism, nepotism, classism, etc. He narrates all the way through, and, until the end, almost never passes judgement, yet we, the reader, gain a sense of his disgust at these things despite his passivity and impassivity. This is indeed skilled writing...

In a key episode he reacts (for the first time - active not passive) against an ordinary but unpleasantly-sexist character who has always (without explanation) treated him as a friend. Milo makes a huge physical gesture, tipping over the offender's flower stall in retaliation to his overt sexism, and in doing so is finally being true to his values and extricating himself from a friendship (like all the others) that he didn't want to be a part of in the first place.

After the flower stall denouement, he loses his job and becomes (from being very rich) very poor. His father, who has been mute and vegetative (for as long as Milo has been trapped and kidding himself, we imagine) dies, Milo learns his persistent sleep problems reflect his need to control (or his panic at a life he is not in control of), and, his pride and joy, an incredibly expensive 3000 year old Greek helmet, for which he traded in all his beloved former armour collection and paid an extra few thousand for, got stuck on his head as he tried it on for the first time and had to be cut off - ruined. Armadillo means little armoured man. In the end Milo sheds his armour... It is a credit to the author and his painstaking structuring that these themes and plot strands converge at the end in an almighty organically-symbolic crash.

But if you do reject society's values, are you left a hermit or can you change things for the better? The novel doesn't come down one way or the other. Take one of the key motifs: music. Milo rejected all Western music post-1960 (one of the few ways in which he let his instinct flourish). He was working his way round the world in music and, at the time of his life in which the novel was set, was listening to African music. He came in contact, through his noxious work, with a rock musician whom he influenced to listen to this music, and who eventually built a whole recording studio round the name of the album Milo had led him to discover - sheer acimoto. This could be a statement of hope - you can influence mankind for the better - or one of twisted pessimism - the rock singer may well have totally misunderstood the nature of this music, and will probably turn it into more mass-produced 'ungenuine' (as Milo would say) rubbish, as evidenced by the commercialization element of a recording studio.

But whatever the consequences, the message unflinchingly remains: don't collude, even passively, with the evils of society. You may be the only one who can see it, it may leave you exposed to point it out, but in the end you'll lose yourself in society if you don't reconcile the differences between your point of view and its in your own favour.