Tooly Zylberberg is an enigma to herself and others. “Even when alone, she wasn’t sure what she was like.” As long as she can remember she has been adrift on a continuous journey — a “never-ending voyage” — that has taken her to a multitude of places around the globe. Residence was always transitory.
In time, she’d be off to another destination. Her companions on this zigzag trek in Tom Rachman’s “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers” were four adults whose exact relation to Tooly and each other is not immediately clear: Introverted computer expert Paul, manic and unpredictable Sarah, mysterious and cunning Venn and kindly aging Humphrey, who speaks with a thick Russian accent.
It was the avuncular and comical Humphrey who became Tooly’s mainstay as the others wove in and out of her life. His personal history is nebulous. Maybe he really had escaped from the Soviet Union. Perhaps he really had spent time in China and associated with Mao Tse Tung. Did he really live for a time in South Africa? Much wasn’t clear. Tooly and Humphrey “had lodged together for years, sharing homes in a dozen cities. The cause of each move had been Venn.” Is Tooly at the center of some arcane international intrigue, or is she simply an innocent pawn in a more pedestrian puzzle?
The novel opens with Tooly in her early 30s. With her slim frame and short hair, she cuts a boyish figure. Her wanderings have brought her to Wales and the prosaic town of Caergenog “just across the Welsh side of the border with England.” She has become the owner of World’s End, a former pub, now a charming musty bookshop with a disparate collection of roughly 10,000 volumes. Tooly bought the operation from an older couple who were blunt about the difficulty of making any profit. The husband tells her: “Perhaps it’d be interesting for someone who wants to read a lot. With a bit of youthful energy and such, you might do better than we have, financially speaking, but you won’t get rich.”
With her eccentric shop assistant Fogg, who always “appeared as if recently awakened by a fire drill,” Tooly makes a tenuous embarkation in the used-book business. It is not a completely incongruous choice of profession. Tooly’s odd planetary pilgrimage left little opportunity for formal schooling but she enjoyed reading and was always steeped in literature. Aware that ubiquitous electronic media poses a challenge to any independent bibliopolist, or rare book dealer, Tooly realizes “you couldn’t stop a tidal wave by wagging your finger at it. She considered bookselling to be a terminal vocation.”
“The Rise and Fall of Great Powers” is the second novel from Rachman, a Londoner who made an impressive literary splash with “The Imperfectionists.” Before plunging into fiction, he honed his writing chops as a journalist. In news reporting, Rachman asserts that such work “taught me concision and clarity—to ensure that above all, my meaning is understood—and to strive for stories that grip readers in a hurry.”
Time moves back and forth and back again as the narrative lights on three phases of Tooly’s peripatetic life. Energetic and precocious, she is a kid of about 9 living with Paul in Bangkok, Thailand. She is skirted away surreptitiously by Sarah, who comes out of nowhere but knows well who Tooly is. Over time, Sarah would be sometimes admired, sometimes loathed. She brings Tooly to another part of town and a makeshift disco pulsating loudly with writhing bodies and ample booze. The place is overseen by her impressive friend Venn. Also on the premises is Humphrey, ears stopped up with earplugs, focused on a chess board and utterly disinterested in the pounding music, dancing and drinking on the floor below.
Venn becomes Tooly’s intermittent mentor in the arts of audacity and dissimulation. He “was a man of a thousand acquaintances and hundreds of lovers, yet she was his only friend. If Tooly had an area of expertise in the world, it was Venn; she had studied him for years.”
A consummate conman, suave Venn lives by his wits and succeeds with alacrity. He is like a rascally big brother, and Tooly is elated whenever in his presence. On occasion they have worked as a team. “Venn and she had engineered many people in the past. It was intoxicating, the unholy control of another human.” By the time she is in her 30s, Venn had been out of touch for 11 years with no explanation. Tooly sets out to find him and hopefully find herself in the process.
With this novel Rachman has structured a tantalizing and gripping tale.
Book Review - The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman