An Unobtrusively Profound Potboiler
- Book: Blindsided
- Location: Sardinia (Sardegna)
- Author: Julian Edge
Profundity is seldom found in the most obvious places. One famous example is the fictional rivalry between Salieri and Mozart in Peter Shaffer’s play ‘Amadeus’. Salieri, a picture of studied seriousness and sobriety, laments the superior talent of the ‘boastful, smutty, infantile’ Mozart.
As a 2012 Salon article titled ‘National Book Awards: Genre Fiction Dissed Again’ pointed out, genre fiction is literary fiction’s poor relation when it comes to critical acclaim. But accessible works of art often offer as much or more social, historical and psychological insight as those that are ostentatiously highbrow.
The premise of ‘Blindsided’ would not be out of place in a light-hearted romance, but it gradually takes a turn deep into the thriller genre. Narrator Ralph, a cerebral, circumspect Englishman, accompanies his partner Clare to Sardinia on a working holiday. They have been together since she was still a student and he a young lecturer, but now that they’ve reached middle-aged ennui, separation seems imminent.
While renting a car, they encounter the square jawed American Tex, whose folksiness suggests for all the world that there is less to him than meets the eye. By Tex’s side is the puzzling Cass, whose taciturnity leads Clare to speculate that she might be autistic. As it turns out, Cass is multilingual and multi-layered, and not in entirely benign ways.
By turns titillating and terrifying, Ralph’s Sardinian journey causes him to encounter incidents and individuals that belong well outside the quaint world he inhabits. Around the halfway point of the novel, he tells Clare: “You’re going off with two people we hardly know to meet with people we don’t know at all about something that might well be a bit shady”.
After one of the novel’s most violent scenes, Ralph reflects ‘my philosophical meanderings seemed in that moment about as useful as pissing on my shoes’. Cass’ subsequent deliberations, about the mating and hunting habits of hyenas, are much more on point, and encapsulate how a middle-aged person’s search for excitement can easily go wrong.
The log plume ride of a plot takes Ralph to time in a police cell, marital breaking point, and the death of one of his companions. In the first half of the novel, Ralph muses: ‘I never intend to visit cathedrals, but I usually do. I think of it as a professional obligation. I am frequently offended by the ritualised celebration of superstition and cruelty that these houses of horror display.’ In his sheltered life, Ralph has assumed that systemic cruelty belongs to the past. This gripping book has the wisdom to know that that is not the case.
On the subject of finding profundity in unexpected places, after the 2006 World Cup final, a member of the public called into BBC Radio Five Live and said: “This World Cup shows that there are no heroes, only different shades of villain”. This novel encapsulates why that line has always resonated with me.
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