|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Thirty-three seems a bit young for a mid-life crisis, but the man who calls himself "Peter Chilton" (sometimes "Sir Peter") has come to an evident cross-roads in his career. In fact, he is finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the work at hand, which is killing people he doesn't know. It is a job at which Peter Chilton has proved extremely successful over the years. He never misses, as he is happy to tell us, and he has no interest whatsoever in his targets or why they are under contract. He's not even especially interested in who his employers are; a mysterious group known as the Firm, they might be a Mafia-like group of gangsters, an international consortium of businessmen, or quite possibly, a secret branch of government. The have him on retainer and he performs to specifications. Though an American, he's been operating in England for a while with occasional trips to the Continent. And in England, he's fallen under the spell of Georgian architecture, with particular reference to Turner's painting Mortlake Terrace: Early Summer Morning. He begins to construct an imaginary identity as a British gentleman who could inhabit such a home. Even on a brief trip to the gritty reality of his native New York State, he maintains the fiction, adopting what he fancies is a posh English accent and claiming some remarkable (and unintentionally funny) real estate holdings "back home" in England. But all this is a distraction from his metier and the Firm decides he needs a holiday in Barcelona, where the extravagances of 20th century architecture struggle for attention against his Georgian preoccupations. Through it all, Peter Chilton, though moved and even entranced by art, remains the cold, remorseless sociopath he always was. CALLING MR KING is a thoroughly original change on the notion of the hit man - that staple of America noir fiction. We hardly come to like the protagonist, but we feel about him as he does about an elephant he observes in the London Zoo: "I was thinking how odd an elephant is. Whoever thought up such a weird thing? I wondered." As must the reader, when contemplating Peter Chilton. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, September 2011
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
