Armadillo

Though ARMADILLO will take most listeners a couple cassettes to sort out, this superbly read novel amply rewards patience. The beginning is a grabber. Protagonist Lorimer Black, an upwardly mobile London insurance adjuster, insomniac, diarist, calls on a client, only to discover that he has hanged himself. Or is it really suicide? Enter Black's dependent family, his quirky co-workers, his lovers, and a few other weird folk, some of whom, like Black himself, are on the edges of a scam with mysterious consequences. A man of many voices, reader David Case is outstanding in his differentiation among a whole (but not wholesome) cast of characters. He is particularly adept at portraying Lorimer as more passively than actively entangled in events somewhat beyond his control. Case's highly dramatic narration fits the story well and makes Boyd's novel a most satisfying experience, albeit an occasionally difficult one. T.H. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine

September 28, 1998
The ever inventive Boyd--whose highly praised first novel, A Good Man in Africa, was followed by others set in Africa and America, sets this latest work in contemporary London, which he observes with the close attention of someone seeing it for the first time. In fact, his protagonist, Lorimer Black, is not exactly a native: his ancestry derives from an obscure Central European Gypsy clan who made it to London after the war. Lorimer is the only truly Anglicized one among them, from his name to his careful sense of what to wear and say on every occasion. He is a loss adjuster at a big insurance company, whose day begins unsettlingly with the suicide of an insured client he was about to visit. Then a new hotel building, mysteriously overinsured, burns down, and his boss, the overbearing and cheerfully philosophical Mr. Hogg, seems to want Lorimer to investigate. A dreadful new colleague comes into his life and tries to make Lorimer his best friend; Lorimer falls hard for a mysterious actress glimpsed in one of his company's TV commercials; his car is vandalized, and he is attacked in the street; his elderly father dies suddenly; and Hogg turns nasty and fires him. Throughout all this, poor Lorimer, stricken with a severe sleep disorder, tries to get some rest at a sleep clinic where he seeks what he calls "lucid dreams," which--unlike his waking life--he can control. Boyd's comic writing is zesty and brilliantly on-target about contemporary Londoners, high and low, and Lorimer's adventures have enough of an alarming edge to keep a reader constantly, and delightedly, off balance. The only flaw in an otherwise sparkling performance is an odd and unlikely journal Lorimer keeps, which is designed to fill the gaps in his previous life, but which never sounds like anything other than the author's voice. Editor, Vicky Wilson; agent: Georges Borchardt.