The Key of the Tower

by Gilbert Adair

A novel set in France and with a complex plot of innumerable twists. It incorporates a silver Rolls-Royce, a mysteriously ubiquitous tower, a chic and mercurial Frenchwoman, a rediscovered masterpiece of art history, and a pursuit across the Brittany coastline, with a climax at Mont Saint-Michel.

Genres: Fiction

176 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Gilbert Adair was a Scottish novelist, poet, film critic and journalist. Born in Edinburgh, he lived in Paris from 1968 through 1980. He is most famous for such novels as Love and Death on Long Island (1997) and The Dreamers (2003), both of which were made into films, although he is also noted as the translator of Georges Perec's postmodern novel A Void, in which the letter e is not used. Adair won the 1995 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for this work.

In 1998 and 1999 Adair was the chief film critic for The Independent on Sunday, where in 1999 he also wrote a year-long column called "The Guillotine." In addition to the films made from his own works, Adair worked on the screenplays for a number of Raúl Ruiz films. Although he rarely spoke of his sexual orientation in public, not wishing to be labelled, he acknowledge in an interview that there were many gay themes in his work. He died from a brain hemorrhage in 2011.

(source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Kalliope]

I bought this book because of its cover. It came up in my feed some time ago, reviewed by M.J., and those eyes on the top caught my attention even if they were looking sideways and not back at me. I had seen them before and I therefore earmarked the book.

The title would ring a different sound and a different meaning in French. The Key of the Tower: La clé de la tour. This is a veiled reference to the 17C painter from the Duchy of Lorraine, George De La Tour, for the novel hovers around his paintings. As we have now an exhibition of this painter in the Prado Museum and I had the catalogue in hand, I remembered suddenly about this novel and promptly placed my order.

An engaging reading this certainly has been since The Key to the Tower is a thriller. This was also my first Adair and his prose offers several very beautiful passages with original writing. These came, however, intermittently--for plot demands carry the baton in a thriller. The alluring and seductive setting framed the story resulting in a mix between a tourist brochure and a glossy celebrities magazine: Saint-Malo, Rolls-Royces, large villas, golf courses, an enrapturing lady and the astounding Mont-St-Michel. Adair also peppered his writing with the elegance of French quotes, and like the figure hiding the ace of diamonds in the painting at the top, he has used them to hide somewhat dim cues. A reader who can detect the difference between a vous and a tu (and that both do not simultaneously correspond to you) would be like the viewer of the painting who can see the cheating that is going on in the cards scene.



There are also some French quotes that are not included in French and these come from Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe. For indeed, in this inventive story a rather crude and violent thug turns out to be a Proust-fanatic who carries his well-thumbed volume of the French master in one of his pockets and a gun on the other. I had to laugh.

As the suspense builds up and the pace quickens, commonplaces also accumulate and the ludicrous surfaces. Improbability is dangerous: it can dissolve the mirage of fiction. Impatience, rather than enrapturing tension accelerated the urgency in my reading. What was not implausible, though, is that the fake painting would be a counterfeited De La Tour. With the Prado catalogue on the side, I peruse over the long essay on the great difficulties for connoisseurship and long history of false attributions that have plagued what we want to appreciate as De La Tour’s oeuvre.

The Key for me to Adair's writing was not in the way he developed his fictional story, but in those passages that probably tried to lead to a quality of writing for which Proust must have been an inspiration.


---

The cover comes from The Fortune Teller, around 1635, and now in the Metropolitan in NY.It was advertised in the 1980s as 'Possibly the most controversial painting in the world.

[TBV (on hiatus)]

Ingredients
One naïve (?) Englishman
One femme fatale
A pair of incongruous thugs - oh, alright, add another!
Two motor vehicles which must be a Rolls Royce and a Mini
St Malo
Mont Saint-Michel
A miscellaneous golf course plus miscellaneous golfers
And last, but certainly not least, a painting by no less than Georges de la Tour

Method
Place all ingredients in a pot, add a touch of violence, a smidgeon of humour, a chase or two and a healthy dose of Proust. Stir, simmer, add a final twist and voilà! You have a delectably entertaining escapade. Enjoy!

Oh, and here are some secret ingredients:

“‘Innocent, you say, innocent? Don’t you realise, Lantern, that for those of my profession it’s the innocent who cannot be trusted. Crooks I trust. Villains I understand. They have their speciality, and, heaven bless them for it, they can be depended upon to stick to it. Embezzlers don’t blackmail. Arsonists don’t cheat on their income tax. Serial killers don’t hold up tobacconists’ shops. Ah, but the innocent, now. They are, by definition, capable of anything, and we can never know what it is they are capable of until it’s too late. Oh Lord, protect me from the innocent’ - here Rieti joined the tips of his fingers together as if he truly were supplicating the Almighty. ‘There is - yes, yes, yes, I will personally vouch for it - a species, an extremely fragile species, I grant you, but a species all the same, of honour among thieves. I have yet to find much honour among you honest folk.’ “

“‘What on earth is going through that head of yours, Shirley?’
‘My head?’ said Shirley, opening her eyes as wide as the two wee things could go. ‘Why, nothing, Béa, nothing whatsoever. You know me.’”


Warning: Not to be taken too seriously as it might then become unpalatable.

[MJ Nicholls]

This is Gilbert’s least ingenious novel—a straight-up thriller and entertainment that keeps one’s bum amused for two hours, if it doesn’t exactly tickle the cerebrum—takes place in Saint-Malo, where the protagonist Guy Lantern, bored by the “insipid beauties of the picturesque,” finds a welcome detour in a forged painting adventure with a glamorous femme fatale and a Proust-quoting gangster. Those fluent in French will have a head-start on the monoglot readers, as pivotal information about the plot is smuggled into untranslated French dialogue, although the events unfurl and build to a strong climax for the baffled unitongues. The star here is the elegance of Adair’s unwinding sentences, his delightful first-person narrators and their sublime descriptions (usually of the more trivial stuff). His dialogue is as usual amusing and literary. Shame the plot is made-for-TV fodder. (Albeit with more cinematic nods). A delightfully upmarket thriller.

[Stewart]

The thing with Adair is that there’s no real consistency to his books. After enjoying the postmodern murder mystery of The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd, he followed it with the lesser A Mysterious Affair Of Style; similarly the high of The Death Of The Author was followed by The Key Of The Tower (1997), arguably the weakest in his ouevre.

Dud or not, reading Adair’s prose is always a delight, purely for the unashamed fun he has with wordplay and subverting expectations. Reading him is always like sitting down to listen to an old friend that you don’t quite trust.

Read my full review here.

[Hilary]

Over-written and disappointing.

[Ric Cheyney]

This was a mixed blessing of a book. On the one hand it is a first-person narrative mystery/thriller that at times reminded me of John Buchan, definitely a good indicator; but on the other hand it is not only a clever book, it is smugly proud of its cleverness. The dust jacket has comments and comparisons connecting to Nabokov (bad sign), David Lodge (very bad sign) and Anthony Burgess (whose entire body of work could disappear without anybody missing out on a single rewarding sentence).
A Goodreads reviewer named Hilary has described this book as 'over-written' and she is correct. Try this: "Beneath us the ocean heaved, each of the successive creases on its wavy surface ironed out, as it approached the shoreline, by a rolling cylinder of spume that would then decompose on the beach, spreading a dark arc of soaking wetness across the sand like an egg white cracked into a sizzling frying pan." (p. 101). Yes, and I have to report that there are many similar clunkers throughout the book. Sadly Adair is equally capable of the most puerile banality, like "It grew larger and larger." on page two.
And yet..... Well, the story keeps you interested all the way through, and there are some vivid and memorable characters, some central and some just minor mechanisms but all of them well realised with visual presence and distinctive voices. Plus there are many little details of character and setting that work perfectly well. I've given this book three stars but it should be three-and-a-half really.
Despite its weaknesses and my many reservations, I do feel able to recommend this book to anyone seeking a fast, reasonably gripping story. Adair's bibliography suggests he was too clever for his own good; you need a bit more heart in a novel, I believe, and I won't be trying his other works. Nevertheless, I was sad to learn that he died of a brain haemorrhage in 2011, aged just 66.

[Майя Ставитская]

Скверный анекдот

Машина, картина, картонка...

Место действия - французский Сен-Мало и окрестности, время - неопределенное прошлое, которое с равным успехом может быть тридцатыми, шестидесятыми или даже днем сегодняшним. Хотя сегодняшним - нет, скорее первое или второе. Два человека едут навстречу друг другу по шоссе, один из них турист поневоле - ищет лекарства от сердечных ран в этом курортном городке; второй - признанный эксперт по живописи, консультирующий солидных коллекционеров. Как раз сейчас он направляется на одну из таких встреч и опоздать никак не может себе позволить. Но очевидно придется - на дорогу перед ними падает огромная сосна, лишив каждый из автомобилей возможности продолжать движение в заданном направлении.

Я сказала, что эксперт, Жан-Марк кровно заинтересован в продолжении пути. Его оппоненту (не в смысле "противнику", а в значении "человеку напротив") англичанину Гаю, в общем, нет большой разницы, но тоже приятного мало. Француз предлагает поменяться автомобилями: "Через неделю я закончу свои дела и верну вам вашу малолитражку, а вы пока поездите на моей". И это царское по щедрости предложение. учитывая, что ему предстоит пересесть с потрепанной машинки эконом-класса на Ролс-Ройс (интернеты говорят о сегодняшней цене в среднем 30 000 000). Кто бы отказался? Гай - нет.

Машина, как это всегда бывает в детективах с предметами роскоши, обладателями которых становятся простаки, немедленно начинает диктовать условия игры. До неузнаваемости меняя мир нового владельца и притягивая в его жизнь прекрасную женщину, безумно дорогую картину, яростного врага. Ну, что сказать об истории в целом - очень обаятельный плутовской роман, если начало напомнит вам Себастьяна Жапризо, то продолжение явно в духе Иоанны Хмелевской. А финал... Ну, про финал вы решите сами. Книга совсем небольшая и есть в аудио (для лентяев, как я).

[ShellsReads]

Undoubtedly this is a strange little novel with a potentially split writing personality with a very sketchy plot. Quite mystifying – is it an attempt at parody or simply rather poor writing?

The narrative of this odd little tale barely hangs together – it doesn’t bother with plausibility or logic and relies on a main protagonist whose naivety borders on mental defect. This gives ‘The Key of the Tower’ a dreamlike quality where things happen to the main character without apparent freewill or thought on his part.

The writing style veers between styles, sometimes a fairly standard perfectly, adequate prose but sometimes launching into the most bizarre lengthy descriptive passages with some frankly hilarious purple prose in the style of someone like Mary Webb.

The night had spread two thick smears of butter over my closed eyelids. I burrowed as deep into my pillow as if it were a cloud, as if my head with its butter-coated eyelid might gloriously mine its way through the pillow to its reverse half still nestled in darkness.

Is the author a hidden comic genius parodying the genre or just a mediocre writer rather lost in his own labyrinth of experimental fiction? Perhaps just a mixture of both. Though puzzling and mildly entertaining, Gilbert Adair is not an author I am anxious to read again.

[Avie Clarke]

A chap called Guy bumbles off to Brittany attempting to take a little holiday from the memories of his past. As he approaches Saint Malo, lightning fells a plane tree blocking the road and he is persuaded to swap cars with an art dealer heading in the opposite direction. From here Guy enters a chic and cinematic thriller in the line of Graham Greene and Nevil Shute.

We have the femme fatale, Mme Cheret, blonde with a small neat, waist. "Her eyebrows, which were noticeably darker than her hair, had the form of two little, matchingly praying angels. Between the fingers of her right hand, which was posed on the staircase rail, she was holding a cigarette." "She was tanned. Yet... it was the tan of money, not of the sun... the innately tanned skin, as if bronzed from the inside out, of those born to die rich."

We have charming henchmen: "... a grotesque gangster and his punkish gunsel, hair radiating from his skull like a golden sunburst mirror above a mantelpiece. And now here he was, the gangster himself, sprouting Proust at me."

We have cuckoldry upon cuckoldry, dialogue as sharp as a good Sancerre and a central mystery - what and where is the key of the tower?

Adair has written a light and entertaining novel in simply delicious prose. Save it for les vacances and consume it with tarte tatin and galloises.

[A13]

Книга, которая притворяется то Незнакомцами в поезде, то мистером Рипли, то Двойной страховкой, а все равно нечто большее и значимее. Сюжет постоянно намекает на что-то знакомое, но герои какие-то слишком умные и говорят о чем-то слишком серьезном и важном, автор иронизирует и юморит, да и сам текст написан так четко и складно, что музыка для глаз.

[MELTEM GULSOY]

Interesting but not like other Gilbert Adair books which are more than interesting; at the very limit of strangeness... Quick and pleasurable read, that’s all.

İlginç ama diğer Gilbert Adair kitapları gibi tuhaflık sınırında değil... Hızlı ve keyifli bir okuma, o kadar.

[John Eastman]

Meh

[James]

Oldukça ilginç bir kurgusu vardı. Oldukça sevmiştim bu kitabı.

[Ari Sarkar]

Gilbert Adair's mastery of the English language and his writing style are the reasons I read this - I was not disappointed. The plot is neither here nor there. But it was joy to read.