Conspiracy

In photography, balance, whether radial, conceptual or symmetrical, is critical to the success of a composition. An unbalanced photograph can confuse, obfuscate or otherwise diminish an image. It is the same for a literary writer (Nicholas Shakespeare has twice been Booker-longlisted) taking on the thriller genre. Finding an equilibrium between prose styling and fine plotting requires considerable skill and a gentle touch. In his second outing for the former journalist John Dyer, Shakespeare treads this tightrope nimbly. Following the events of The Sandpit (2020), Dyer is in Tasmania, engaged in research for a book on the Tupian peoples of the Amazon. He is soon interrupted by a voice from the past, that of Miguel Girondo de Belew, an Argentinian photo-journalist.

Fifteen years ago, A.M. Homes published The Mistress’s Daughter, an explosive, painful account of how she met her birth mother, Ellen, who had placed her for adoption as a baby when, as a very young woman, she became pregnant in the course of an affair with an older, married man. Perhaps the most memorable scene depicts her mother, who had instigated the contact between them when Homes was in her early thirties, appearing without warning at a reading Homes was giving in a bookshop. The writer’s panic and discomfort at this unexpected ambush, and her sense of what it might foreshadow, were palpable (and she was not wrong.