He’s one of England’s finest legal minds, but Robert Purcell is a pompous weasel in need of a come-uppance. This comic novel is Robert’s autobiography – a kind of confession that his wife badgers him into writing after he commits a terrible crime.
Robert applies ice-cool calculation to the most emotional of matters. The son of a judge, he grows up in an upper-crust Suffolk village, certain that he’ll be following his father to Oxford and to the bar. He ‘selects’ a wife who meets parental approval and the million-pound Highgate home inexorably follows, replete with sea-grass floors and cello-playing daughter.
This is light reading but deceptively so, offering deliciously well-observed vignettes of the top legal set: their country piles and failed marriages; their brazen certainties; and their sense of superiority and entitlement. One suspects that Canter, who studied law at Cambridge, detests Robert and the world he represents in volcanic measure. Through Robert’s father, we see nobility in the pursuit of justice, but Robert himself is so thoroughly odious that one just yearns for someone to knock his lights out. He’s an unforgettable creation – but rather like a sketch-show character with his comic flaw highlighted in flashing neon. A more nuanced protagonist would make this a richer novel.
Fortunately, though, Robert is surrounded by a cast of hilarious, cartoonish characters: Mike, his film-producer friend in a perpetual quest for ‘authenticity’; Guy the advertising exec turned organic yoghurt-maker; Judy, the gold-digger who manoeuvres through the book’s male characters; and Valerie, Robert’s snooty, whisky-glugging mother.
The story builds to a knockout climax, and one is left with a rather unexpected after-effect… Robert is infectious. Long after your time with him is up, you might just catch yourself bringing his loathsome logic to your own domestic dilemmas.
