The Escapist

Adam Thirwell

By Charlotte Lepora

The Escape promises to be a great read, its cover smothered with praises for this writer’s amazing literary prowess, encouraging the reader to be impressed by his obvious skill and wit and craft. If the storyline – a 78-year-old libertine who is fighting for the ownership of his late wife’s villa whilst developing an affair with two younger women – seems a bit icky or maybe even a little dull, we have to trust that this praised author will handle it with the utmost skill, taking us into the twisted alleyways of the conscious of an interesting yet troubled man whilst describing with beautiful rhetoric the shady past of a philandering Jewish banker.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. The writing may seem impressive at first, with amusing metaphors and winding sentences, but it grows old quickly. You grow restless for the action to happen while Thirlwell insists on digressing about random past events in Heffner’s past that appear distracting with their faux-philosophy.

The overabundance of exclamation points is irritating and cheesy and actually serves with fracturing any kind of fluency that the narrative may achieve. I mean, come on!

Heffner’s downfall is undoubtedly his obsession with women, or rather, his obsession with giving women what they want – even if that means hurting everyone else in the process. His reasoning is convoluted and dense, and the use of omniscient narrator who tries to impose some kind of character onto a characterless position gives the narrative a kind of inauthenticity that makes it even harder to connect to any of the characters. Raphael Heffner is an obnoxious man without any hope of any kind of redemption, and the only way to empathise with him is through his upcoming death, which makes the whole read a wearying slog.