8/10 Book of the week

This new novel by writer and campaigner Tim Finch is an example of form echoing content. His background as a broadcaster on political issues with the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera and CNN, as well as with the Refugee Council (where he served as a director) and the charities he has founded, gives Finch’s inhabiting of the rarified world of international negotiations a credible ring.

From a reserved and formal beginning, the book works through successive revelations which open up to the final location, where the narrator finally confronts his diminished emotional state.

Senior diplomat Edvard Behrens presides over a peace conference between two unnamed European groups.

His reputation as an international arbitrator takes him to a hotel in the high Tyrol, where he keeps fit with early morning Alpine walks and confides in his beloved wife Anna, who is not with him. During a hiatus in the proceedings, he travels to Berlin and starts to reveal more about his wife’s absence.

The formal tone of the early chapters gives way to more emotional utterances, and when the conference resumes, Behrens has broken through his emotional stalemate.

The writer’s evoking of different locations, past and present, is a feature of the writing. “Our lasting attachment to Ghent stemmed, as these attachments often do, from having had an especially lovely time the first time we were there… It was winter time; cold and blue, cold and black – with stars! Our visit was neither too long, nor too short – a long weekend, probably. The hotel was boutique, before that just meant small and overly expensive.”

“We never tried to analyse our love for Ghent, though such an exercise would have been easy enough. It was eminently suited to our ‘High European’ sensibility, our love of history, of art, of architecture, of culture generally; of good food, good wine, good living.”

And on leaving Berlin: “I was in a taxi to Tegel by this stage, looking out through lachrymose windows on a city in turns bleak and cold, light and warm. Black rivers, canals and waterways. Dark hulks of industry and tenement. The dazzle of finance, consumerism and lifestyle. Pockets of domestic, almost cottagey warmth. This is a spread-out, strangely underpopulated city.”

This is a subtle novel and relies on nuance and intuition, as the reader enters into the turmoil of the narrator’s world, both in the course of his work and in his own psyche. Peace Talks, published in April, is recommended for the discerning reader.

Review by John Badenhorst.

Peace Talks by Tim Finch, Bloomsbury, Hardback £16.99