The Destroyers

Christopher Bollen

Scribner, £14.99

Review by Ronald Frame

THIS novel is made for summer. It’s the size of a brick. Photographed on the wrap-round cover, sharing puffs from Jay McInerney and others, is a bare bronzed shoulders-and-back (female, probably, although not necessarily) and a vista of violet-blue sea and greeny-blue sky, with one’s eye drawn to a tiny white yacht in the distance. Since other authors must be invoked in contemporary publishers’ fashion, the comparisons made in the quotes are to Graham Greene (lost on me), Lawrence Durrell (not sure), Patricia Highsmith (well, the Mediterranean and misfit American drifters) and F Scott Fitzgerald (party time and $$$’s).

New Yorker Ian Bledsoe, hitting the age of 30, arrives on the Greek island of Patmos to rendezvous with childhood friend, Charlie. They are both alumni of Buckland Academy, a Manhattan school for sons of the super-rich. Ian’s recently deceased father owned a large baby-food concern, manufacturing internationally in the badlands of Panama, while Charlie’s ailing father heads the vast Konstantinou construction empire, based in Cyprus and responsible for providing the Middle East (or its dictators) with its infrastructure of roads.

Ian arrives not long after a bomb explosion in a harbourside taverna. Life is carrying on, somewhat apprehensively. The two friends are reunited, and Ian is introduced to Charlie’s actress girlfriend, Sonny, as well as to her young daughter (called Ducklin, no less) by an LA film director. Further recipients of host Charlie’s largesse include a past girlfriend in Ian’s life, Louise, now studying law (defined for us as a last ditch career choice and strictly for the unimaginative), and Englishman Miles, ex-Buckland and fond of a drink or three, also Charlie’s cousin Rasym, working for the family firm and both a convert to Islam and committed to beautiful boyfriend Adrian (whose oligarch father owns most of Poland).

These are our dramatis personae. We also have some local employees of Charlie’s yacht-hire business, and Petros, a modish monk who drives a white Merc very fast and sports a gold Rolex watch.

We shall be with the characters for nearly five hundred pages. The author portrays them all convincingly, except for ‘Duck’, who sermonises in a self-righteous way surely no seven year old would.

Ian and Charlie reminisce about a game they used to play as boys, called Destroyers. Three raiders in black balaclavas are coming after them, wherever the pair of them happen to be, and they have to think up ways of outwitting and escaping from them.

So much jet-setting social privilege, and so much natural beauty on the summer isle of Patmos.

But not all is as it appears. The Buckland dynasties turn out to be uncommonly dysfunctional, funds for some in our group have dipped all the way to zero, it’s unclear to them who might be friends and who enemies, and as for this paradise backdrop set in the royal azure sea …

Patmos is where St John the Divine wrote the Book of Revelation. In that the New Jerusalem was conjured up from a rambling account of human sin and suffering and damnation, and the "holy island" is now a truly hellish place … On to its shores are washed up Syrian boat-people, alive or drowned, while further from the tide-line are the makeshift tents of Camp Revelation and the others, rubbish-strewn homes to the strong-arm Christian hippies preaching love and armed revolution.

Was the bomb really a one-off protest against Eurozone economics? What is the involvement of the Orthodox monks, ever-savvy, and why are the police so interested in the affairs of the Konstaniniou clan?

A grave misjudgement in Ian’s past will live forever on the internet, but Charlie overlooks this in order to offer him a job. Had Buckland concentrated harder on the Classics, and had he spent less time playing Destroyers, Ian might have known to beware gift horses …

Fasten your seat belts for the ride ahead.

There are problems. The novel is too long, even though recent books promoted as significant (eg The Goldfinch) are generally allowed to spread. For what is being touted as "a smart, sophisticated literary thriller", and one with a sunny summery cover, the chapters trundle on, with too few stopping-off places. (Greene had a screenwriter’s respect for our patience, and Highsmith knew from her short story writing how to cut.)

The author can sustain our interest in the plot, what’s coming next, but it’s essentially a mechanical exercise. And the Epilogue has too much of the fairy-tale about it. After the accumulating grimness of events, resulting from unbridled greed now and in decades past, there’s something unconvincing about this tag-on, where money (stolen, and lots of it) becomes a possible curative. Oh, really?

Perhaps more of an issue, for me at any rate, is the unlikeableness of the main characters. Narcissists all, connected to the world chiefly through their mobiles and iPads, it’s hard to feel much concern about what happens to any of them. We’ve been in a vipers’ nest for 18 sprawling chapters; it’s proved to be a parade of personal selfishness and vanity, with a low humour count and indeed very little human warmth to detain us. (The sex is as uninvolved and unloving as one might expect.) Jay Gatsby had a measure of charm and also an aura of optimism about him which born-to-money Charlie patently does not. These New Yorkers, natives and incomers alike, are depressingly self-obsessed – even in their carefully selected charitable dealings, which are run up as credit like air-miles.

Having given several hours of your time to a novel, you might hypothesise about what it would be like to meet the characters. Not in this case. I would run a mile to dodge any encounter – with that precocious eco-vigilante seven-year-old especially.