World of Tennis 2001 Book

Very much a companion piece to Cocaine Nights, by taking some of the main themes from that and transferring them from the Costa del Sol to the French Riviera, expanding on them, resulting in a richer, deeper, and generally better novel all round. On the surface we have an intelligent satirical thriller with a whodunnit scenario, but it was the sinister underbelly - the darker revelations - that really got to me the most. The protagonist Paul Sinclair could have been plucked straight out of Cocaine Nights - someone cut off from modern life, standing on the side lines waiting to unravel its core, whilst trying to find the answers to his own alienation. And like Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes has, in the psychiatrist Wilder Penrose, a side character who really steals the show. Penrose's Eden-Olympia is one huge monster - a wealthy hi-tech business park sitting in the hills looking over the French Riviera - home to the workaholics and new elites who have life just the way they want it. Here, being sucked up in the world of work has left any social life down the sink hole, as the executives hidden away in their glass-fronted buildings are only ever seen getting in and out of fancy chauffeur-driven cars. But behind the corporate megalomania, there is trouble in paradise - linked to the killings of Dr. Greenwood who gunned down a handful of people for no apparent reason. Sinclair uncovers a network of crime - a serious programme of violence designed by Penrose to counteract the stress of work - from sex games (it was uncomfortable reading in places once child sex abuse is exposed), attacks on Arab pimps and Senegalese merchants, to robbery, vandalism, and ultimately murder - while his young paediatrician wife Jane (Greenwood's replacement) feels less of a wife, by getting hooked on recreational drugs and starting an affair with a neighbours wife. Sinclair, with the help of Frances Baring, an Eden-Olympia employee and former lover of Greenwood, sets out to expose all the wrongs within this French Silicon Valley. On the one hand Sinclair is appalled by what he comes across, and yet, he somehow finds admiration and justification for the ruthlessness behind the businessmen's therapeutic criminal activity. In the long run, I don't think this will become as memorable as High-Rise - my favourite so far - but still, it was a really engrossing read, very accessible, and right up there with his best fiction. 4.7/5