Race Sim Central

BOOK REVIEW: 'The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim'

”Terrible” rarely modifies “privacy” because we usually think of privacy as highly desirable and hard to achieve. But for Max, the central character of Jonathan Coe’s novel “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim,” privacy is rather harrowing. His wife has left him and taken their daughter with her. His father has left, too, and is living in Australia. His friend Trevor has moved away. His mother is dead. He has 70 Facebook friends but knows few of them in the flesh. He gets lots of emails, stays in electronic touch on his cell-phone and has no trouble striking up casual conversations with strangers, but at the end of the day - and for much of the hours beforehand - he is alone with more privacy than anyone could want.

Readers meet Max in a Sydney restaurant. He’s been visiting his father, who as usual has been unapproachable and taciturn. Mourning this chill relationship, Max envies a Chinese woman and her daughter happily enjoying each other’s company at another table. He tries to imagine how such companionship would feel. His loneliness makes him fantasize that chance encounters presage something closer. When a gorgeous young woman called Poppy, whom he meets en route back to England, invites him to dinner, he thinks this may be the start of a romance. No such luck.

On the other hand, Poppy introduces him to the story of Donald Crowhurst, who in 1968 entered a race to sail a boat around the world single-handedly. Crowhurst was not a sailor: he was a misfit, an early computer geek, who filled his boat with electronic gear. Little of his equipment worked, and after floating round lost in the Atlantic, he returned to England a broken man.

Crowhurst’s angst is the opposite of the warmth of the Chinese woman and her daughter. Longing for some comparable joyful bonding and fearful that he could descend into Crowhurst’s lonesomeness, Max decides to re-connect with people from his earlier life. A new job requires him to drive from the south of England to northern Scotland, giving him the chance to visit the Midlands, where he grew up, travel northward to spend the evening with his wife and daughter in the Lake District, and then drive on to Edinburgh for dinner with Alison, the sister of his closest childhood friend.

Each encounter yields information about his past. Under its duress, Max spins downward as he drives away from Edinburgh, comforted only by a couple of bottles of single-malt Scotch and the reassuringly pleasant voice of his car’s GPS system.

American Motorcyclist

Abstracts of the papers presented at the XI International Botanical Congress, August 24-September 2, 1969 and the International Wood Chemistry Symposium, September 2-4, 1969

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A system of modern geography ..., Illustrated by an atlas of eighteen maps ...

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