Armadillo (novel)

Infobox Book
author= William Boyd
name= Armadillo: A Novel
isbn= ISBN 0-375-70216-4
release_date= 2000
publisher= Vintage

"Armadillo" is William Boyd's seventh novel.

Plot Summary

"Armadillo" is set in London, and its protagonist is the 30-ish Lorimer Black, who works successfully as a loss adjuster for an insurance company. However, his birth name is Milomre Blocj and he is familiarly known as Milo to his Gypsy family, which runs a taxi service. Lorimer is caught up in a puzzling intrigue at GGH Ltd., the company where he works, and he is suspected of disloyalty by his boss, a man named Hogg. Lorimer is also beset with the problem of a new company director, named Torquil Helvoir-Jayne, a figure with all the charm of a pit bull without the pit bull's loyalty or courage. However, Torquil is eventually fired and becomes a rather sympathetic and helpless character as he relies upon Lorimer to put him up in his flat and to find him a job in the family taxi firm.

On the periphery of Lorimer's professional world is a beautiful actress named Flavia Malinverno, unhappily married to a juggler named Gilbert, from whom he tries to steal her away. There is also Lorimer's family, including an older brother, three older sisters, a mother and a grandmother, most of whom lean on him, the worldly success of the family, for loans and emotional support.

Hapless but intelligent, Lorimer watches as his world goes to pieces. A brilliant coup that he scores in his work as a loss adjuster goes awry, so that not only are the authors of a false insurance claim murderously angry at him but so, for some inexplicable reason, is Hogg. He begins to receive death threats. Somebody torches his car. His pursuit of Flavia Malinverno runs aground both because of her elusiveness and her husband's menacing jealousy.

Lorimer does not, any more than Franz Kafka's K, understand why his world is being torn apart, though he does know that for the most part his world is made up of bluster and hypocrisy. At one point he watches Hogg, who has just dismissed him, stride off 'with his burly bosun's swagger' and accept a cheroot from the chairman of the company. The image captures the undercurrent of moral brutality of Lorimer's world. ["Armadillo", The New York Times, "A Secret Gypsy With Bad Luck but a Slim Chance", 1998-11-03, Richard Bernstein [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E7DE103FF930A35752C1A96E958260] ] His business, trying to keep insurance companies from paying out the money they've promised, is a con game run with the protection of the law, but Lorimer does his best not to let its unsavory nature rub off on him. His genteel lifestyle is his armadillo's shell but it is not as thick as he would like it to be.

References

External links

* "The New York Times", 1998-11-22, "As Ill Luck Would Have It" [http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/reviews/981122.22scottt.html]
* Salon Books, "Armadillo" [http://www.salon.com/books/sneaks/1998/10/13sneaks.html]
* "Time", 1998-03-30, "Armadillo", "A Bit of Zemblanity" [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1998/int/980330/the_arts.books.a_bit_of_26.html]
* "San Francisco Chronicle", 1999-02-21, "Life's a Shell Game", Gina Arnold [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/02/21/RV85593.DTL]