Paradime by Alan Glynn review: darkly comic thriller

Paradime

Author: Alan Glynn

ISBN-13: 9780571316229

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Guideline Price: £12.99

Alan Glynn’s fifth novel opens with ex-military man Danny Lynch, a veteran of two Iraq tours and recently returned from Afghanistan, struggling to cope with anxiety and dread as he tramps the streets of New York. Unemployed and suffering the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, Danny’s relationship with his girlfriend, Kate, is on the rocks. Unable to remember any detail about his time in Iraq, he is haunted by memories of a horrific incident witnessed in Afghanistan. “It’s just that I really, really don’t want to remember them – wholesale, retail, it doesn’t matter.”

That glancing reference to Philip K Dick evokes the recurring theme of paranoid conspiracy that has run like a seam through Alan Glynn's work since the publication of his debut, The Dark Fields, in 2002. His subsequent novels, the "globalisation trilogy" of Winterland (2009), Bloodland (2011) and Graveland (2013), were set in that shadowy vector where capitalism corrupts democracy, and Paradime continues in a similar vein. When it appears that Danny is planning to blow the whistle on Gideon Logistics, the contractor operating at the Afghan military base where two service personnel were murdered during a riot, Danny is threatened with public disgrace, financial ruin and a prison sentence. It's a scenario familiar to any fan of the classic 1970s tales of paranoid conspiracy – Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View – but it's at this point that Glynn introduces his joker in the pack, when Danny meets Teddy Trager, a billionaire tech visionary and Danny's doppelgänger. Danny becomes obsessed with Trager, mimicking his dress and speech – a man with nothing to lose fixated on the man who has it all.

It seems like an odd narrative gambit at first, and the timeless motif of the doppelgänger – which has its roots in ancient Egyptian folklore – is initially a jarring presence in Danny and Trager’s gleaming, futuristic world of Manhattan’s Silicon Alley. It’s a gamble that pays off handsomely, however, as Glynn emphasises the Gothic horror of being confronted with the “billion-to-one” shot of a perfect double.

Edgar Allan Poe and Dostoevsky's The Double are evoked as Danny struggles to come to terms with a life lived in the mirror, darkly. Traditionally, in literary terms, a paranormal harbinger of doom, the appearance of his doppelgänger initially appears to be a stroke of good fortune for Danny, although soon he is contemplating the existential nightmare of seeing himself reflected in, and refracted through, his awareness of his own essential truth.

An enthralling psychological thriller-cum-tragedy on a personal level, then, Paradime is also a blackly comic tale as Danny finds himself swimming with the sharks who dominate the highest echelons of power and finance. The illusion created by extraordinary wealth is that the onepercenters are different, special, superior – but if any old Tom, Dick or Danny can play the part (treated as a genius and guru, Danny finds himself meeting Bill Clinton and George Clooney, and being interviewed by Charlie Rose), then the edifice is built on even shakier foundations than the cynical, suspicious and mentally unbalanced Danny could have suspected . . .

As with all great novels, Paradime raises more questions than it answers. Is Danny, our Everyman, a "puppet with a soul" plodding along in a noirishly predetermined universe? Or is he that most fascinating of literary creations, the character bound by fate but determined to rebel, regardless of personal cost, against the chains that bind? All told, it's a pulsating tale from one of the most inventive practitioners working in contemporary crime fiction, a novel that pounds to the rhythms of the conventional thriller but employs its tropes to divert its protagonist, and the reader, down some very unusual dark alleyways.

Declan Burke's latest novel is The Lost and the Blind