The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
What the gardener heard
The hectic life, times and bedroom antics of a self-made man offer plenty of rich material for Jonathan Buckley’s 12th novel
TELL by Jonathan Buckley
200pp, Fitzcarraldo, T £10.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP £12.99, ebook £5.99
Stories about the superrich, from Dallas to Succession, tend to focus on their subjects’ dysfunction. Yet Jonathan Buckley’s 12th novel, Tell, is just as interested in the virtues and habits that allowed its hero to be successful – and the profound opportunities to experience the world that money affords him.
The rich guy, in this case, is Curtis, who was abandoned by his mother and raised in a series of foster homes, then made a fortune in retail by selling “catwalk clothes at high-street prices… The idea was to accelerate the process, not just let it trickle down.” The idea, in fact, came from his wife Lily, who was already married when they met, and had a very young daughter, Katia. And here some dysfunction creeps in: when her parents divorce, Katia sides with her father only until Curtis makes good – at which point, as a member of his staff puts it, people become drawn to him like “bees to money”.
Buckley’s novel, framed as a series of interviews, covers the full span of Curtis’s life. The cast includes Katia and her occasional partners; Conrad and Carl, Curtis and Lily’s two sons (one good and one less so); the sons’ wives and children; Lara, a journalist who wants to write a book about Curtis and may have had an affair with him after Lily’s death; Karolina, Curtis’s art buyer and another possible lover; and many other women and members of his entourage and staff. Most of the action is set at Curtis’s “palace” in Scotland, and narrated by the gardener who works on the estate. Or “told”, as in Buckley’s title, for while she briefly interacts with Curtis, much of what she knows about him comes from gossip among the staff.
The gardener, we’re given to understand, is discussing Curtis with a production team interested in turning his story into a film. This leads to a certain amount of artificiality. Sections of the novel are separated by transcript-style comments on the audio recording – “[pause]”, “[indistinct]”, “[inaudible]” – most of which fall conveniently where chapters would naturally end or begin. And the gardener has only had limited access to the scenes that matter, so she often relies on exponential hearsay: “And Curtis told Lara, and Lara told Asil. And so on, down the line.” There are also literary flourishes that can’t quite be explained by her recollection of events: “What he was remembering, in many cases, was just the facts of what had happened. If that. The externals, not the interior. Like a stack of empty boxes. That’s how Lara described it.”
But Buckley’s format also yields great rewards. It allows the gardener, as she tells her boss’s life story, to jump from episode to episode and character to character without the structural impositions of a conventional plot. And her voice, for the most part, is as natural and vivid as real voices are. She turns out to be both modestly resentful and quietly admiring of Curtis’s world – not a bad emotional vantage point. After a slightly catty digression about one daughter-inlaw, who contrived to spend a lot of time alone with Curtis during a moment of crisis, the narrator adds: “Anyway, which of us can put her hand on her heart and say we’re always 100 per cent sincere? She could have been kind and calculating at the same time. And the personality
The gardener says his rich employer drew people to him like ‘bees to money’
isn’t everything. The personality isn’t the person.”
Tell does drift, in its gossipy way, toward a kind of climax. Although, as the gardener points out, “This isn’t a TV thriller. There’s not going to be any great revelation. No plot twist” – hinting that it’s up to the production team to devise a Hollywood ending. In fact, there are plot points: Lily’s death, Curtis’s car accident, his fraught reunion with his estranged mother. And, even if that story never builds to anything greater than the sum of its anecdotes, many of those anecdotes are really rather wonderful indeed: thumbnail-sketches of characters who briefly pass through, potted histories, family myths, jokes, reflections on a life lived in proximity to greatness. Tell is one of the best new novels I’ve read in a while.