Risk, By CK Stead, MacLehose Press, 267pp,
£16.99
Strange how a life can fall apart, gradually being
deconstructed as the elements that gave it meaning, or even just its glue, are
damaged, lost or erased. Though not always: some people prove better able to
save themselves. One such survivor is Sam Nola, the convincingly human if not
altogether likable central character of Risk, the offbeat, at times irritating
but always canny and topical new novel by the veteran New Zealand innovator CK
Stead.
Risk is a confident, briskly paced and practical account of
one man’s self-rescue, but it is a personal odyssey that is also a study of
modern society on the run. Even the unwilling will gradually identify with this
novel as it offers a snapshot of life in the shaky infancy of the 21st century.
In the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq War, and the money
bubble that heaved and swelled until it burst and woke the world, Nola, a
middle-aged lawyer, embarks on a pilgrim’s progress with a difference.
As the marriage that produced two sons founders on his
infidelity with a distant cousin, he suddenly discovers that he has a grown
daughter from an earlier affair. He had actually loved Simone, the Frenchwoman
with whom he had shared a heady romance even though she was already engaged
elsewhere. Then she left him. Nola took to licking his wounds, an activity he
appears to have mastered during a life in which he has never had to try very
hard to attract female company.
Stead’s use of the word “risk” has many meanings in this
novel, aside from the financial context. Nola takes many personal gambles – as
does Stead with a character who is neither a hero nor an antihero. Sam Nola
clearly suggests that it is, as many commentators maintain, a man’s world and
that women really are from another planet.
Risk, with its shifting use of time and floating set pieces,
is highly readable. Stead, who is also a former academic, literary critic and
poet, writes with an ease and efficiency comparable to those of Justin
Cartwright, the South African writer who has made contemporary middle-class
British fiction his own territory.
In ways, Cartwright has already written Risk, with Other
People’s Money (2011). Yet he is far more playful than Stead – now 80 – whose
robust common sense and reading of human nature are less concerned with comedy
than with expressing an edgy irony tempered by harsh truths.
Nola arrives in England as a divorced man who has bid
farewell to his family life. Yet he is not quite a newcomer, having lived in
London more than 20 years earlier. His return is different; he is more
vulnerable, trying to read the intentions of the younger man who is
interviewing him for a job. Here Stead ensures that most readers will briefly
empathise with Nola, who has to ask outright if he has got the position.
A great deal appears to be happening, including various
deaths, in a novel in which nothing much actually takes place. This is because
Stead, a wily storyteller – and winner of the Sunday Times short-story award in
2010, when, at 78, he was the oldest contender – is such a shrewd observer.
In turn, Nola also takes to watching others. An old friend
and fellow New Zealander, now an academic settled in England, bickers about
politics with his righteous wife as Nola attempts to make friends with Letty,
his doctor daughter, who has tracked him down and to whom he can never really
be a father.
Nola quickly takes to working in a financial empire built on
intrigues and lies, but then he has his own secrets, including a failed novel
that was lost in the post when a literary agent died as a result of bee stings.
Since Stead (right) retired from academia, in 1986, he has continued
to add to what is now a vast body of work. Risk is his 12th novel and his first
since the outstanding My Name Was Judas (2006), in which history’s most famous
betrayer tells his story.
Even more impressive is The Secret History of Modernism
(2001), Stead’s finest work, which contains more than a few nods to the lively
maverick Anthony Burgess. It opens: “My name is Laszlo Winter. I’m a novelist,
and for the purposes of this identification we will begin in Auckland, New
Zealand, at the beginning of the new century, a time when I’d been experiencing
for perhaps three months, perhaps six, something new for me, an obstacle
commonly known as writer’s block.”
An interlinked band of characters wander about, preoccupied
with people and ideas, as well as doomed projects. Winter decides to attempt a
memoir. Stead does not make it too easy, but it is enjoyable, as he can be
clever in an entertaining way.
Risk has traces of this earlier, superior novel and its uses
of random observation and realities. Stead succeeds in making it apparent that
Nola, sustained by rather than burdened by a past that adds up to a life,
remains open to new experiences. A particularly effective minor plot involves a
perfectly acceptable romance with a soon-to-be-widowed woman married to an
ailing billionaire. Stead makes it clear that the relationship is mutually
comfortable rather than intense.
This renders it all the easier for the surprise return from
the dead of a character whose absence appears to prove not only that Nola has a
heart but also that he is far luckier than anyone could hope to be.
Risk, a laconically universal novel, may at times set one’s
teeth on edge, but so does life. As well as telling one man’s story, Stead
provides an entertainingly blunt, realistic glimpse of how a small circle of
individuals stagger through the days, eating, drinking, mating and making noise
and not much sense.
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