Glow

September 22, 2014
This droll, clever, and intelligent novel has an undercurrent of thriller, but it’s a young man’s thriller—or, more accurately, a slacker’s thriller. The setting is 2010 London amid a milieu of underemployed 20-somethings in search of love, raves, and drugs, most notably the “glow” of the title, a new, Ecstasy-like designer drug with an epic reputation. Protagonist Raf’s primary occupation seems to be walking the dog who guards the transmitter of a pirate radio station. He’s also dealing with a “non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome”—he has an abnormal circadian rhythm—that requires a strict, complicated sleep regimen (“It’s like his brain is wearing a novelty watch”). At a rave, he first hears of “glow” and meets the beautiful Cherish. Raf is odd, but the events happening around him are odder still, including the abduction of his friend Theo by a couple of guys driving “a grimy white builder’s van.” The quest for glow, and the story behind the white van, paces the novel, which grows into a complex (but vague) conspiracy story, with lengthy (but interesting) digressions into the backstories of people like Cherish. Beauman writes like a dream (bicycle couriers have a “famished muscularity”), but his plotting is nothing more than a framework supporting a glimpse into a dystopian slacker universe, as well as the neurochemistry of mind-altering substances and the global drug trade.

November 1, 2014
A new club drug tangles a scenester in a global conspiracy in this quirky tale of love and corporate overreach.The third novel by Beauman (The Teleportation Accident, 2013, etc.) opens with Raf, a 22-year-old Londoner, at a rave, where he hears about an Ecstasy-like drug called glow. He's intrigued, and not exclusively for pleasure-seeking reasons: Raf suffers from "non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome," a condition that wrecks normal circadian rhythms, and studying glow plays into his interest in the body's peculiar chemistry. But his investigations uncover something more sinister: Paramilitary types in white vans are kidnapping Burmese men, and Raf soon learns of an effort by a multinational mining company, Lacebark, to control production of glow's organic source in Myanmar. Guiding him through this underworld is Cherish, a half-Burmese woman whose father was a Lacebark executive. She's smart and tough-minded, and a romance soon develops, but Raf doesn't know if he can trust the array of ex-Lacebark employees, Burmese expat revolutionaries and rave promoters who make a relatively benign drug seem like a deadly experience in a hurry. (The bulk of the novel takes place across two weeks.) Beauman writes thoughtfully on how drugs play with the senses, and the novel is spiked with clever observations that connect body chemistry with big-data algorithms and corporate exploitation. In other moments, Raf's bantering with Cherish and his stumblebum investigations add a dose of comedy. But the overall plot is exceedingly convoluted, with just about every character's motivations called into question until everybody seems like a double or triple agent. This may play into Beauman's point about the difficulty of nailing down the nature of the human condition, but the closing pages are burdened by who-did-what-to-whom explication. A respectable effort to play with the thriller form that gets bogged down by those very same thriller mechanics.

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July 1, 2014

In 2010 London's hip rave and drug subculture, Raf, a 22-year-old freelance web designer with an unusual sleep disorder, meets a beautiful and exotic young Burmese American woman named Cherish at a rave in a launderette. Soon Raf is immersed in a shadowy underground of Burmese immigrants battling a sinister corporate conspiracy. The American mining corporation Lacebark has been exploiting Burmese miners for years, but now as mining profits decrease they're looking for a new source of revenue and have decided to enter the illegal drug business. Their product is a mysterious drug used by the Burmese miners called Glow, which only Win, a Burmese chemist in London, knows how to manufacture. Shady characters in white vans are suddenly traversing London, kidnapping Burmese immigrants, and Lacebark has set up a supersecret training facility in a warehouse preparing for a series of raids designed to capture Win and eliminate the opposition. Now, Raf's involvement with Cherish may also make him a target. VERDICT Beauman, named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, has crafted a raucous, seriocomic mash-up of mystery and noir. Combining a wickedly inventive plot with dazzling metaphors and trenchant social observations, this smart and streetwise novel will bring a glow to the reader as well.--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

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