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Rob Watson’s Frail Flesh is a genre piece, a complex thriller complete with bloodbath in the final reel. Set in the north of England, it begins and ends with Doby, a scruffy Welsh ex-soldier, providing the right kind of tired, morally ambiguous anti-hero. Watson’s good at seedy. At the start, Doby holds up a small bank in a shopping centre – it turns out he’s doing a good turn for a feckless brother-in-law – and is drawn, as they say, into larger, ever darker conspiracies involving the government and arms deals.
The book has some of the weaknesses that often go with the form – some perfunctory characterization for the sake of exposition and more plot-twists (mostly guessable) and double-crosses than you could shake an Uzi at. The prose is uneven and the toughness, to me, phoney. But after the creaky setting-up of the first quarter of the novel, Watson handles shifts of perspective with a large cast and complicated plot skillfully and ultimately generates some tension.
More interesting is the theme of self-justification and self-deception in the portrayal of a series of varyingly repugnant men, from the respectable husband with a ruinous gambling habit, to the arms-dealer who refuses to see himself as an arms-dealer, to Doby himself. The only honest man in it is the cop, Burgess, who’s so dull that his girlfriend, the victim of the hold-up, rather despises him. She, Samantha Priest – the sort of name you only get in thrillers – reacts to the pseudo-rape of the robbery by swinging towards self-assertion. Her pumping iron and glorying in her body contrasts neatly with the physical degradation of the dim but good Sharon, the nanny of the kidnapped girl who is the maguffin for the second half of the book. It’s Samantha who provides the final disillusionment for Doby. Here’s a conventionally grim and cynical worldview leavened with a black humour that only occasionally comes off.
Christopher Meredith
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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