A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

April 21, 2014
While preparing to compete in the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Stanford water polo star Owen Burr is struck in the face by another player, losing an eye, along with any hope of a medal. So Owen, the son of a respected classics professor, slips away to Berlin to try his hand at making art. There, he falls in with the world-famous—and slippery—artist Kurt Wagener and disappears. While Owen’s father launches a new career as a social theorist to facilitate a trip through Europe during which he can search for his missing son, Kurt offers to promote Owen as an “outsider artist” at Art Basel, one of the world’s premier art expos. In the lead-up to the show, Kurt keeps Owen in seclusion at his Berlin studio. Owen discovers too late that his new collaborator cannot be trusted, after Kurt tricks him into giving up his intellectual property rights and feeds him dangerous drugs. Meanwhile, his father—branded a terrorist after making an explosive speech in Athens—hunts for clues to his boy’s whereabouts. Chancellor’s debut is a twisting, globe-trotting affair that unfortunately suffers from poor pacing and frequently dwells on the mundane. The result is a mixed bag, unsure of its own identity, like many of the book’s characters.