re:mote voices

Title: Mr. Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer
Author: Russell Hoban
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Serafina has left Jonathan, and he is gutted. After a drinking session, trying to forget his problems, he finds that he is still filled with despair. He sits down where he is, which just happens to be one of the flights of stairs in the London underground. A stranger stops and tries to work out why Jonathan is there, from which he can see death in Jonathan’s eyes. This leads to a Faustian offer, the stranger, who calls himself Mr. T Rinyo-Clacton (T for Thanatophile), offers Jonathan a million pounds and a year to spend it, at the end of which time he will come and collect Jonathan’s death.

Confused and distraught Jonathan finds that he is tending towards the ideas that seem beneficial from this strange offer. However in the cold light of day, sobered and realising that he has just had unprotected sex with a strange man, he is starting to regret his decision to sign a contract with Rinyo-Clacton. Attempting to decide where this new status leaves him with Serafina, he finds that his day to day movements are tainted and shadowed by this stranger, and quickly so are those of his estranged girlfriend.

Hoban presents his lead with a real quandary and builds a rickety platform beneath him, from the top life looks more fragile than ever. Many of Hoban’s regular characteristics and narrative sequences come to play in the course of this novel. The casual pop references from Portishead to Pelleas, the travels through the London underground to the London museums. Along with the sudden trips abroad, seeking something emblematic from the characters past, and how that ties into their presents. At the core of Hoban’s work their tends to be the idea of a relationship, mixing those which are new with those which have shaped personalities – in this case the life shaping relationship and the new one are both the past and future of Jonathan and Serafina. Together they were soul mates, in Paris they shared a dream. But Jonathan’s indiscretions have split them up, and while the fateful intervention of Rinyo-Clacton has forced them back together the journey is one of whether this will end them forever or somehow, impossibly bring them back together. At the same time there is the classic quandary of the money versus death, it is updated, and twisted by the ideas of unprotected sex, and the question of AIDs that goes with that.

As usual Hoban presents a combination of humour and darkness. There is a certain tongue in cheek to his writing style, to the characters, especially ones like the no-bullshit-psychic present here. But there is also the element of broken relationships, of the undertones of death. With Mr. Rinyo-Clacton, Hoban has created a particularly malevolent character, there is something particularly malign to this man, even with the suggestions that there might be something weak to the man himself, he remains this dark threat throughout. The knowledge that there is no way the period of time of this book will cover a year also adds to the tension, the bargain of money for death must come to a head with in the space of a weak or two that this book takes place in, which adds an emphasis to those aspects controlled by time. Once again Russell Hoban does not disappoint.