When a book makes you laugh on the first page — and the last time that happened to me was with Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall — you know you’re in business. Toby Vieira, who was born in India and now lives in Switzerland, may not be a big name, but anyone who read his 2016 debut novel, Marlow’s Landing — a steamy tale of diamond smuggling — will have been looking forward to his follow-up. And it’s even better.
That I laughed on the first page is not representative of the book, which is more of a thriller than a comedy, but it does reflect the sense I had of being putty in the hands of a novelist who knows what he’s doing. I relaxed with relief — then felt tense again as the plot began to crank into gear.
The Undrowned is set in a world like our own, but in it a new virus has begun to spread. It gives you yellow eyes and a fever — and it has an 80 per cent fatality rate. The virus, like the book, begins in an African country referred to only as The Land Of, where our hero Sebastian is working as a journalist.
Being at ground zero is bad news for Sebastian, but good news for the reader as he and his colleagues try to evade the virus and face sinister goings-on at the same time. There’s Nikki the photographer, who heard a mysterious knocking at her window one night. (Mysterious because her room is seven floors up.) There’s David, the cynical, funny reporter with a nose for a heart-tugging story. “Let’s go find that place we went to last time round. The one with the amputees.”
And there’s Ricardo, who goes missing early in the novel after he too heard someone knocking at his window. Soon, the paper that employs them is telling them to get out of The Land Of and promising to send a search party. (Sebastian doesn’t believe this.) But it’s too late: Nikki and David get picked off too, and soon Sebastian is alone — then he catches the virus.
However, he survives, after a long time in what he wryly refers to as “the Very Dark Place” — of which he doesn’t remember much, other than “a vague delirium of polished steel and chemical flavours”. He makes it back to London, but things just keep getting worse. There’s a 28 Days Later feel to the place, abandoned by fear of the virus. His editor won’t let him see the report into his missing colleagues, and people keeping turning up at his door, looking “like a Chernobyl cleanup crew”, wanting to take blood samples — by force if necessary.
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This is the key to Sebastian’s story — he is unique, and alone. What exactly is wrong with him? Is it the after-effects of the virus? Is it survivor’s guilt from being the only one of his friends who has “stayed undrowned”? Or was he involved in their disappearances? Vieira’s skill is to make Sebastian’s world ever more dangerous without skimping on plausibility. Each new level of hell just follows from the one before.
Sebastian both wants a normal life and doesn’t. He misses his dog, he visits his mother, who lives in a cottage aptly named Palaver’s End, and he bumps into a young woman at the airport who invites him to come travelling with her instead of returning to The Land Of in search of his friends. But he can’t leave The Land Of alone, especially when there’s talk of a mysterious warlord, called Khai Manni (or is it Guy Money?), who may be behind the disappearances.
The cover compares The Undrowned to Graham Greene and John le Carré, but I don’t think that’s quite right. It’s more off the wall than that, closer in spirit to William Golding’s immersive whirlpool Pincher Martin, or Theodore Roszak’s wild conspiracy thriller Flicker.
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This is a novel about utter loneliness, the isolation of being unlike anyone else and with no safe place to go. Sebastian just wants everything to be “simple and pure and radiant with hope, not caked in the grime that comes from knowing things” — but it’s too late. For him, for all of us. This is a page-turner that provokes, then moves the reader. A novel that made me laugh on the first page had me sitting in awed silence by the end. The Undrowned is a keeper.
The Undrowned by Toby Vieira (Weatherglass Books £12.99 pp306). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members