Books: Home sweet homebody

By John Ziebell

Voyage to the End of the Room, the latest from Brit novelist Tibor Fischer, is the most entertaining failure you're likely to read this year.

Not that it didn't have promise. Fischer is part of a certain class of maturing males from across the pond--like Amis, Barnes and Banville--who are good at writing intelligently about nothing in particular. And that's fine; there's solid recreational value in books that feature unique, inventive characters riffing on abstractions like cultural decline and global injustice. In most cases, these fictional souls are developed well enough to hang the structure of a novel upon, and if we're adequately engaged, we'll buy into any reasonably acceptable narrative. The first third of Voyage to the End of the Room is rewarding in exactly that kind of way.

"Few pleasures are greater than knowing you can close your door, ignore the world and create your own," says Oceane, the book's first-person narrator. As we come to find out, she means exactly that. Oceane is a computer artist who managed to cash in on a dream freelance opportunity. She may not be a millionaire, but she's rich enough for practical purposes. Money has bought her solitude, and her operative motto is "All of London can be delivered." And not just London; when she gets the yen to experience Finland, for example, her travel agent ropes in Finnish travelers to host a dinner in the apartment below hers.

Oceane's dealings with the real world have brought on a physical and emotional fatigue. It's fun listening to her rant about the crime and ineptitude and ennui that have overtaken the civilization beyond her door, and the narrative has real insight; her catalogue of the spectrum of bums one must endure boarding the subway, for example, is funny coming from Oceane, but also a bit prickly in its accuracy.

Oceane is comfortable in her isolation, and we're comfortable with that; she's smart and sassy and what chaos that invades her solitude is harmless. That is, of course, until she gets a letter from her former lover Walter, which is odd, as he supposedly died a decade ago.

The middle section of the book is backstory time. Before reaching her current level of ease, it turns out, Oceane had a quite different gig; talent in a Barcelona live sex theater. Now doesn't that take us by surprise? There may be nothing that provides the wealth of opportunity for easy tongue-in-cheek thrills as the sex industry, and Fischer rushes in with gleeful abandon. And it's a romp, to be sure. But amid the fun and freaks and girl-talk and sex and commercial sex there are also strange, suspicious deaths and intrigue and mysteries and, sadly, so much of it all that the novel comes apart just like one of those nifty carbon fiber Formula 1 cars hitting a brick wall.

Plot disintegration may not kill a novel, but it sure makes it tough to care about what happens. The characters invest journeyman effort in holding our interest--Oceane never loses her charm, and Audley, the failed soldier/mercenary/bodyguard-turned-bill collector whom Oceane uses as her real-world surrogate, is particularly delightful--but it's too big a task. As much as we love them both, we sure wish they were headed in a direction that promised the payoff they deserve.