I expect the book is rather familiar to a lot of people; I had, at least, heard of it prior to getting the book. The essential outline of the plot is this: a man, somewhat of a modern train spotter, undertakes a bet to visit all stops of the London Underground within a day, or 19 hours as it is. The stake is high, and should he fail, he finds himself without money, without a home, and without a wife.
The plot sounds rather shallow, or at least it did to me when I first opened the book. However, it serves perfectly as the stage of a much deeper set of ideas, presented duly throughout the book in heavy metaphors, and the book that could by its synopsis easily be branded a thriller uses that backdrop very sparsely. In fact, when Lowe does, it usually has a rather poor outcome.
Lowe appears to me to have had the ultimate goal of building this world of quite mundane and everyday things, with an underlying net of metaphors and similes. (Usually, when writing reviews, I never go into too many specifics, seeing as by the time it's published none has seen the film, but I'll skip the broad angles now and try to explain just why I like it)
Take, for instance, the main protagonist's relationship to his girlfriend. If going by the adjectives alone, they would appear to be the very worst couple. In the early stages of the book, Rachel, as she is called, is described only in those segments where the protagonist reminisces her critique, her constant insults. So much so that she insists on writing "Idiot" on his forehead the day before their wedding. She's portrayed as a rather mean woman who fails to understand her boyfriend at all.
Equally so when the book starts working the other way around. Andy, the protagonist, is portrayed a complete nerd, never taking eyes off his overrated interest, apparently loving the Underground more than his girlfriend. The frustration is obvious and, despite the protagonist's insistence on not doing so (as the book is written in first person), it's hard to understand why they would ever want to get married in the first place.
But it ends up being a brilliant metaphor. As the books starts gaining momentum and traction, the young couple, despite their differences, travel upon the very same route. The entire journey is, again, a metaphor for the journey of life, which I at first thought of as a long shot, but which throughout the book became all the more evident. And these two opposites travel exactly the same route, one below the ground, and the other on the road. It becomes the most prominent when the two are not only being faced with the embodiment of their own visions of decay, and realize that they're well on the road to being there. A split-second reflection shows Andy to be a nigh copy of the homeless drunkard, and a
I haven't finished the book, but just how it ends seems obvious. The two, realizing their decay, sees that their wedding towards the end of the book is the sole way to flee this onslaught. Andy, with his hobo companion Brian, notices his own affection for this at first disgusting sight, and how similar he truly is to him. And Rachel, feeling her own aging becoming prominent, finds the wedding day to be the sole way out of this spiral.
And all of this encased in a scenario that not only reflects modern life, but cities as a whole. Apart from a few obvious bad translations in my Swedish copy of the book, and one or two sections that ought to have been edited out in my eyes (such as climaxing with the over-obvious, as in the first chapter revolving Rachel), the writing's quite good and really does the job of encasing this kind-of-drama in a golden shell.
Thus what appears to be a overrated thriller ends up being a truly well-done book that deserves every ounce of praise it's been given.
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