Books
A Greek island setting is an inspired location for a thriller in which nothing goes to waste.
By Colm Tóibín, Christopher Bollen, Briohny Doyle, Simon Sebag Montefiore and chess GM Garry Kasparov, and on how occupied Europe kept up the fight against the Nazis.
Broke, disinherited and publicly disgraced after a disastrous misstep during an internship in Panama, Ian Bledsoe has “no plan but this one”: to flee the United States straight after his billionaire father’s death and connect
with his old friend Charlie on the tiny Greek island of Patmos, in the hope of finding a job or some kind of personal reinvention or just the oblivion of the fabled holiday that lasts forever.
But Bledsoe, of all people, should remember the risks of a single escape route: as schoolmates, he and Charlie shared a dark game of imagination called Destroyers, in which armed intruders appear from nowhere to turn everyday situations into battles for survival.
Set 20 years on, The Destroyers wastes little time in revealing that terrible things can happen on Patmos,
even before our protagonist comes into view, so it’s little surprise when the outlines of a real-life trap begin to appear in this literary thriller, the third novel by Christopher Bollen, a New Yorker who was editor-in-chief of Interview magazine.
His Ian is a mixed bag as a protagonist: he’s self-pitying and falls prey with surprising ease to pleasant delusions, yet he’s intelligent and sympathetic enough for the reader to be invested in his fate even when some of his plight is self-inflicted.
He looks on Destroyers as having been a rehearsal for negotiating the world at large, but it’s done little to prepare him for the situation he’s drawn into as the novel progresses. He fumbles through
with some measure of
cunning and a larger degree of luck, with success never guaranteed.
Patmos makes an inspired choice of setting, connected only sporadically to the wider world by hedonistic tourists, desperate refugees making their way towards Europe and a fringe counterculture drawn by the island’s fame as the birthplace of the Book of Revelation.
Limits of geography and transport provide a believable location for modern-day suspense, in which no character or set-up goes to waste, and both the biblical associations and contemporary politics reinforce the novel’s sense of unpredictability and foreboding.
The unique atmosphere doesn’t quite conceal some familiar dark-side-of-paradise suspense tropes, but precise pacing and rhythm make The Destroyers a suitably propulsive experience – and Bollen’s sustained, finely detailed attention to relationships and games of trust goes well beyond the demands of the plot, lending the novel surprising moral and emotional heft: this is a game to be taken seriously.