Something to Answer For

Townrow, a small-time fraud who has done well enough out of insurance and other people's trust, receives a letter from the widow of an old friend in Port Said, asking him to come and investigate her husband's death, which she believes was murder. It is 1956. Townrow arrives in Egypt, is beaten unconscious almost immediately, and spends the rest of the novel unable to establish anything with confidence: whether he is Irish or English, whether he was ever married, what he did or did not agree to, and whether the war going on around him is happening in the way anyone says. The Suez crisis unfolds through concussion and rumour. Newby uses his hero's damaged memory to arrive at a very English discovery, which is that the country he has always assumed to be honest has been lying, and that the lie is not a lapse but a method. The first winner of the Booker is a strange, hallucinatory and rather sour book, and its central moral argument, delivered obliquely and without comfort, is precisely the one 1956 forced on that generation.