A Lonely Man by Chris Power

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 4, 2021

Novelists often base characters on people they know. They sometimes go so far as to tell another person’s story in the form of a novel. Is it a form of theft to use a real person’s life as the basis for a fictional story? Should the author obtain consent before incorporating details of a person’s life into a novel? Chris Power explores the ethics of creating fiction in A Lonely Man.

Robert Prowe is a British novelist. He irritated his mother by basing an early story on a childhood vacation in Greece. Now he is tempted to repeat that potential sin by writing about a mysterious man who may or may not be involved in Russian political intrigue.

Robert is living in Berlin and struggling to find a story worth telling. He’s under a contract deadline to produce a new book. During a chance meeting in a bookstore, Robert learns that Patrick Unsworth is also a British writer, but one whose domain is nonfiction. Patrick ghostwrites biographies for celebrities and politicians.

Patrick seems a bit drunk and disagreeable. He clearly has no friends in Berlin. As an act of charity, Robert agrees to meet Patrick for a drink. When the meeting finally occurs, Patrick explains that he had to cancel or no-show earlier meetings because he was being followed. Robert believes that Patrick is imagining things but listens to Patrick’s story.

Patrick explains that he was hired to ghostwrite a tell-all book for a Russian oligarch who had the goods on Putin. After the project was underway, the oligarch was found dead, having apparently hanged himself. Patrick is certain that the oligarch was murdered and that Russians in the service of Putin are coming for him too.

Robert doesn’t believe Patrick is in danger. He nevertheless believes that Patrick’s story would be a good plot for a novel. As Robert begins to work on the novel, he even includes himself as a character, the writer who listens to Patrick’s story. The story of the oligarch’s suicide resonates with Robert when he learns that an old friend has hung himself in a closet, a strange place to take one’s life.

A Lonely Man follows the two men as they walk the thin line between paranoia and danger. As events unfold, the reader wonders whether Patrick is delusional or the actual target of Putin’s thugs. Robert asks those same questions. Someone indeed seems to be following them when Patrick is with Robert. Someone then seems to be following Robert, who may have placed himself in danger by listening to Patrick’s storis about Putin and the oligarch. Robert even receives a phone call that might be perceived as a threat to harm his wife.

Whether Robert or his family are actually in danger is ambiguous for much of the novel. That ambiguity contributes to the novel’s evolving tension, as the reader wonders whether branding Patrick’s fears as paranoia will be a fatal mistake.

Robert arguably invites trouble by befriending Patrick. He does so in part because he feels an affinity with Patrick, but Robert also believes Patrick’s story might be what he needs to overcome writer’s block. Karijn, Robert’s wife, does not approve of Robert’s appropriation of Patrick’s story without Patrick’s consent. Robert argues that writers steal life stories all the time. He is troubled, however, by his developing sense that “another person had grown up inside him, a shadow-self whose existence she knew nothing about.” Robert is becoming like Patrick, but is he becoming paranoid or is really facing a threat?

Chris Power sets the tone by building distractions into the story that seem vaguely menacing. Robert and Karijn own a cabin on wooded property near a lake in Sweden. When Robert visits the property with a plumber to repair a pump, the trip seems ominous for no obvious reason. When he later takes his daughters to inspect a fort they built in the woods a year earlier, the presence of beer cans suggests intrusion into the family’s privacy. Yet until the final pages, it isn’t clear whether Robert or his family are at any risk of harm at all.

The last few pages provide an anticlimactic answer to that question. They force Robert to make a choice between loyalty or betrayal, the kind of moral choice that makes spy fiction so fascinating. Yet the ending seems abrupt. It is foreshadowed by all that comes before, but it leaves the reader hanging. Novels often challenge a reader to imagine what will come next. This one leaves the feeling that the story is unfinished, that the reader will need to do all the important work.

Still, Power proves his ability to set a scene and to create characters in depth. At first blush, the title seems to refer to Patrick, who has no friend but Robert. Upon reflection, the reader might wonder whether Robert is the lonely one. Perhaps Robert reached out to Patrick not just for story material but to make a connection to someone from his homeland, a connection he can’t easily find in Berlin, one that his Swedish wife cannot provide. That might be why Patrick travels back to London for the suicide victim’s wake, despite not having kept in touch with the man during their years apart. A Lonely Man demonstrates Chris Power’s writing skill and offers the reader an intriguing story on multiple levels, even if the ending is a bit disappointing.

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