Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires [Paperback]

Having loved Adair's 'A closed book' I was excited to come across another one by him. But this is very much a different beast altogether. On the face of it, the story is about Gideon, a complex character (more on this in a moment) who escapes from Oxford to Paris and takes up a post teaching English at a Berlitz language school. Like him most of the other English language teachers are gay, and he works hard at engineering a role for himself in this group as they brag of their latest sexual conquests. Gideon is not a character that you immediately warm to and this is something that he freely admits he himself can understand (the book is very much written in a confessional autobiographical style).

Unlike 'A closed book' the narrative does not play as strong a role here. This is the story of a moment of recent history rather than that of an individual. Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires transports us back to the early 80s - a time when HIV and Aids were largely unknown and certainly misunderstood. It is hard for us to imagine that time now but it really is not that long ago that Aids was seen as 'the gay plague'. Yet we now live in a different world. It is to Adair's credit that he manages to breathe life into his characters and into this time so expertly.

There were a number of parts in this book that made me smile - particularly when the main character would relate some bon mot that was exchanged in the Berlitz staff room during break time. At times I did wonder if the author was just crowbaring them into the story when a good pun occured to him. But then I realised that relating amusing things that others have said as a way of reflecting positively on himself is something that the main character would be very likely to do. This is someone who is desperate to find his identity - as a sexual being, as a gay man, as a someone.

This is not a book that is easy to categorise. Memoir, fiction, fact, gay history - elements of all of these can be found here. I deliberated long and hard before deciding on my overall score. Finally I settled on 3/5. I enjoyed this book but found that it was too easy to put down. Not that a book always has to be the 'just one more chapter' type but here I wasn't sure what I took away from this one when I had finished. Maybe simply a better understanding of a time now very much in the past.

I found Adair's latest offering ebmarrassingly self-indulgent and annoyingly whimsical. One shudders to think what the result might be if Bertolucci (to whom the book is dedicated) decided to film it.

It is possible, I suppose, to miss the cleverness of Gilbert Adair's Buenas Noches Buenos Aires, and dismiss it as crude, banal and filled with unsympathetic characters. But the observant reader will note the clues which demand that we treat the narrator with suspicion, and cast doubt on everything he says, as early as page 2 when he tells us, impossibly, of placing a bookmark between pages 17 and 18 of a book (if you don't see why, try it yourself). Yes, we are in the realms of unreliable narrative and postmodernity, Adair's favourite twins.

As such this novel is his best since 1992's The Death of the Author, and indeed because the cleverness is so well subsumed into the surface story - which is attractive enough in itself - you get two books for the price of one. Adair is a whizz with a neat one-liner ("homosexuality," reflects the narrator, whose initials are also GA, on discussing the anonymous promiscuity and casual contact-making of his 1980s gay milieu, "the love that dare not speak its name, but is more than happy to leave its number") and the more erudite sort of pun (a ribald story is credited to "Onanymous"). Indeed the writing is so good that the content of the book becomes almost secondary.

But the story is interesting too, and unlike many almost-too-clever-by-half writers, Adair delineates his characters effectively and effortlessly. There is even a heartfelt mixture of real comedy and gripping tragedy in one scene, which begins with a tooth falling out and ends with a world, literally ("I use the word 'literally' figuratively, of course" as Adair's narrator would say), falling apart. If the end subject matter is not that surprising - gay life in the 1980s, what do you think is coming next? - then its delivery is: a black comedy, in fact, of a big disease with a little name. And that's before you even consider whether what we're being told is fictionally true, or fictionally false. Figuratively, I mean.