Adam Thorpe’s new novel could be read as a companion piece to his last, ‘Between Each Breath’. Both take a scalpel to middle-class smugness via an unsettling encounter with foreign cultures, and both take as their keynote that definitive bourgeois obsession, finding (and deserving?) the perfect house. But while ‘Between Each Breath’ put its protagonist on the rack of midlife impotence and self-delusion, ‘The Standing Pool’ is an altogether lighter work, notwithstanding its unsettling atmosphere and gleefully disconcerting denouement.
This year’s failed male, Cambridge historian Nick Mallinson, has lost his career path and his voice and must take a six-month sabbatical to regroup. He packs up his family – wife Sarah, their three young daughters and his hippy son-by-a previous-marriage – to a rambling old house in the south of France, dreaming of bucolic simplicity and a lifestyle to match his unwavering eco-leftist belief system. Almost at once, though, his fantasies curl up under the glare of reality: their landlords, the Sandlers – an unrepentantly incorrect Anglo-American couple who specialise in looting antiquities – are hellbent on finessing their house, and instruct the Mallinsons to supervise on their behalf. This brings them into conflict with Jean-Luc, the handyman who broods over the malfunctioning swimming pool and harbours all kinds of grudges against the English, the house, his neighbours and indeed his mother. Thorpe layers on gothic trials and points of conflict to challenge Nick’s genial liberalism, all the while slicking events with a scum of menace. The question is not whether something tragic will happen, but whether the family’s niceness will be enough to keep them safe. In the end, is safety – or niceness – even an option?
One of the joys of this book is the way Thorpe’s trademark strengths – his genius for nuance and featherlight touch with character and dialogue – are brought to bear on a tale which constantly threatens to morph into a wildly unhinged thriller. Unexpectedly satisfying.
