The Angel in Flames

In his novels, Lawrence Osborne is a true master at sending affluent Westerners to marvellous places and making them dance dangerously on the brink of disaster. Whether in Hydra, Morocco or Hong Kong, the setting changes but the outcome is always the same. With "The Angel on Fire", a collection of short stories recently published in Italy by Adelphi, Osborne has simply stepped up the pace: nine stories, nine protagonists, nine new opportunities to send everything spiralling out of control. In "Ghost", an unscrupulous American broker navigates Hong Kong amidst the Chinese property crisis, convinced he knows the rules of the game inside out. In “The Wave”, an entomologist survives the Andaman tsunami and discovers that even a tragedy of biblical proportions can turn into an unmissable professional opportunity. In the story that gives the collection its title, however, a wealthy New York couple hire a young woman with hearing difficulties as a domestic worker. Here too, of course, things will not go exactly as planned. What is surprising is how at home Osborne is with short stories, managing to condense into just a few pages his usual cocktail of money, sex, ambition and that particular brand of misfortune which, in his books, tends to strike mainly those who delude themselves into believing they are immune to it all. Somerset Maugham did something similar a century ago by sending merchants, colonial officials and wealthy English ladies to the tropics. Osborne has swapped steamships for intercontinental flights and clubs for boutique hotels, but the pattern appears virtually identical, even if the situations spiral out of control in completely different ways. Sometimes violence rears its head; at other times, a minor humiliation is enough; on yet other occasions, a sudden reversal of fortune is sufficient to transform a seemingly well-organised life into something unrecognisable. What is carefully avoided, however, is any moralising. The characters are not punished because they are rich, greedy, naive or unfaithful. Quite simply, they make the wrong choice, meet someone they shouldn’t have met or, quite simply, are just unlucky. Osborne guides them step by step to the point where they realise that things have now spiralled out of control, showing no particular mercy and offering them no way out. In the final story, an angel goes up in flames; in the preceding eight stories, it is primarily the protagonists’ lives that go up in flames.

Lawrence Osborne
, "The Angel in Flames
", Adelphi, 318 pp., 20 euros