A gardener’s super-rich boss has gone missing in this captivating interrogation of storytelling
British novelist Jonathan Buckley writes perceptively about how loneliness attends both idealism and scepticism. His work is full of solitaries: a murdered vagrant and the investigating policeman in So He Takes the Dog; the curator of a failing museum in thrall to the memory of his free-spirited ex-lover in The Great Concert of the Night. He is preoccupied by how the yearning for communion leaves us vulnerable to the charisma of mystics and mediums. A less subtle writer would come down on the side of empiricism; Buckley, though, shows how a tough-minded refusal of transcendence can lead to a wintriness of the heart.
Tell, his 12th novel, is presented as a transcription of five sessions of an interview, further divided into fragments and interruptions (“indistinct”, “inaudible” or “pause”). Abandoning one of the novel’s pretences, that it builds worlds with impersonal authority, Tell adopts another: that it is a written image of speech. The interviewee is an unnamed gardener on a huge Highland estate whose boss, Curtis, a self-made squillionaire and another of Buckley’s solipsists, has gone missing, presumed dead. The interviewer is making a film of Curtis’s life but does not speak, as if confined to the imperative of the title word.
