Finding beauty amid a life filled with angst

Complex novel conveys profound philosophical truths all can relate to

THE EDGE Jamie Collinson Loot.co.za (R294) ONE WORLD

REVIEWER: JENNIFER CROCKER

ADAM Fairhead is a Londoner who has moved to Los Angeles to manage a US branch of a British music company. We meet him on the edges of the Los Angeles River early on a Tuesday morning while he’s bird-watching – not as in looking for women as one might assume of a music industry player, but looking for real birds, in the calm of a mad city he has come to love.

It’s while he is watching and pondering, in a somewhat ennuiridden way, whether he really likes his life, that a woman rides past him on a bicycle.

To his mortification (Adam thinks quite a bit of his life at age 36 is mortifying) he finds himself watching her Lycra-clad body as she passes him. To his horror, she turns back, gets off her bike and comes over to show him a rather wonderful bird-watcher’s find in a tree. It’s an osprey, and Adam’s day is cheered by the shared moment.

Jamie Collinson works in the music industry and it’s clear from the music and the facts in the book that he knows his subject, and he’s written a novel about a man who is at the top more or less, and yet hates his job more and more every day.

He might love LA and the city does come alive for the reader, but he is suffering from a mid-life work crisis. Complicating his life is the fact that the smallish company he worked for in London has had a huge injection of cash and the arrival of a new manager who is known by Adam as the Autodidact, aka Jason.

Jason has ideas on where music should be going, at precisely the time Adam is wondering whether he should be running away from the industry. He’s haunted by the relentless need to stay on top of things, to manage staff who increasingly irritate him, and yet he’s somewhat terrified by the fact that when one of their less talented artists falls off the roof at a roof party, his first reaction is that it is a pity that the man didn’t because then they could have become famous.

And then, as in the case for all of us who have moved, there are those who have been left behind, whether the leaving was physical or metaphorical.

He misses and obsesses over his long-time ex-girlfriend Sophia and worries about his mom who has mid-stage dementia.

The Edge is a complex and magnificently written first novel, the way in which Collinson writes with economy of style, while conveying profound philosophical truths about life is never pretentious.

He has the gift of putting the absurd or the beautiful in the middle of moments of angst and wrapping them up in a gorgeous gift of a book.

Read it and remember when there was a time before Coldplay was old-school; read, weep and laugh.