Nicholas Searle - The Good Liar

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Poorly written and morally questionable

There's a decent story here and a clever structure, too, but I'm afraid I didn't think this was well enough done to be successful.

The Good Liar is the story of Roy, now in his eighties, who is a con man.  The narrative cuts between the present-day story in which he is attempting to con an elderly woman out of her life savings, and Roy's history.  This is cleverly done as we get episodes moving back in time so each episode explains how he arrived at the previous one.  This is effective and if it were better done could have made for a very good novel, but I had some very serious reservations about this book.

The first problem is the style, which I found poor and a bit amateurish.  It is plodding and rather laboured a good deal of the time with extensive descriptions and histories which aren't very relevant, and lacks any subtlety or finesse of suggestion which would have been more effective.  The prose is also peppered with very tired cliché: "nattering away thirteen to the dozen", "they had bigger fish to fry", "little did they know that…", " the term bandied about…", people repeatedly say "my little plan" or "my little adventure" like a 60s Bond villain talking about some intricate enterprise, and so on and so on.  It really isn't good enough and made the whole thing a bit of a slog.

Even though the direction of the present-day story becomes pretty obvious so that the denouement isn't much of a shock, I thought the book picked up well around half way…and then there's a section which I really didn't like.  The history eventually reaches back to Germany in the Nazi era and the Holocaust.  If you're going to use the Holocaust to add weight to a book's plot, you need to do it very well indeed; it needs to have subtlety, depth and real human involvement to justify it – and to me this didn't.  The book's general style and lack of real penetration of character or situation made this feel facile and hence bordering on the offensively exploitative.  (Try Natasha Solomons' The Novel In The Viola for a recent example of how to do it well.)  I also found the book's ending predictable, clunkily unconvincing and eventually ludicrously sententious.

So…not a book for me, I'm afraid.  Despite its merits of structure and the potentially good story I thought it was poorly written and unacceptably exploitative in places.  I can't recommend it.