Innes, Michael - From London Far (1946) aka The Unsuspected Chasm

Review by Nick Fuller

5/5

Among Innes’s large and uneven output, this most gleeful and exuberant thriller stands out as one of his clearest triumphs. It is the diverting story of an innocent (middle-aged scholar named Meredith) abroad, plunged into murder (one of which he commits, the other he instigates) and crime (the doings of the International Society for the Diffusion of Cultural Objects), against a picturesque backdrop of warehouses, ruined castles and Highland moors, and a lunatic nouveau riche connoisseur’s American mansion. Dialogue is splendid, and the humour makes this Innes’s funniest book. Not only mild academic jests, but superb farce, largely provided by the pick of the gallery of certifiable lunatics: an endearing psychiatrist who is as mad as his patients (whom he believes have abducted him by furniture van to be instructed in sexology), who begins by believing that the furniture vans that keep following him are psychosexual hallucinations; to keep himself sane, he refuses to believe in any of the adventures that ensue when he is kidnapped. Now there’s an idea for modern drama!

An elderly scholar inadvertently says a password in a tobacconist shop and plunges into a conspiracy involving post-war art theft on a huge scale, set in London, the Scottish Highlands, and California. One of Innes's phantasmagorias, absurd and great fun, although the language is more stilted than ever. Each part has an excellent Innesian set-piece: a warehouse for art thieves in London, a ruinous castle on a Hebridean island, and a Hearst-like millionaire's house somewhere in the US. In each case there are some very bizarre touches.

Wyatt James