Beautiful Animals, book review: 'Pacey and filled with tension'

As in earlier novels, Lawrence Osborne is interested in what his characters do when events are wrested out of their control, his narratives unfurling like a set of carefully lined-up dominoes

Like Christopher Bollen’s Patmos-set Highsmithian thriller The Destroyers, which was published last month, Lawrence Osborne’s fine new novel plunges us into the world of wealthy American and British holidaymakers lounging under the Greek sun. Beautiful Animals opens on the island of Hydra, where “it was the law of summers among the rich that the season of leisure should flow like a large and charming river. The imperative was to have a good time and float along on the luminescent surface”. Two young women – 24-year-old Naomi, a lawyer who recently lost her job after mishandling a “politically sensitive” case in London, and 20-year-old Sam, a bored New York City Wasp – each holidaying with their parents, strike up a friendship. Naomi is older, she knows the island better (her family have been coming here since she was a child), and offers Sam amusement: the promise of “meaning” to the otherwise “endless” summer that stretches out in front of the younger woman.

Not long after they begin spending time together, the two stumble across a man – Faoud – washed up on a lonely beach. A Syrian refugee, they assume, one of the many flooding the Mediterranean. Naomi, overflowing with “relentless charity-worker passion”, makes a project of him, hatching a plan to send him on his way to a new life in mainland Europe. Although she’s less convinced that they’re doing the right thing – “You could help a stranger without making him into a cause,” she reasons – the more passive Sam is caught up in the action, weakly protesting but unable to change her friend’s mind. It comes as no surprise, of course, when it all goes horribly wrong.

As in earlier novels, Osborne is interested in what his characters do when events are wrested out of their control, his narratives unfurling like a set of carefully lined-up dominoes. “Morality,” Naomi thinks naively, “was nothing more than paying attention to the chain reaction while not causing another one.” If you’re expecting some kind of cut and dry treatise on the refugee crisis, you’ll be disappointed. On the rare occasion the bigger picture is directly addressed, it’s bleak. “If we keep them out it destroys them; if we let them in it destroys us,” Naomi’s father says. “Do we have the stomach for that dilemma?”

The latter half of the book settles into a chase across Italy – Faoud no longer on his way to a new life, but on the run from the law instead – which, although pacey and filled with tension, can’t help but spread the reader’s attention a little thinly between the various characters involved. Quite who we’re supposed to be rooting for – cat or mouse – I wasn’t sure, especially since no one is beyond reproach, Osborne painting a world of the murkiest morals. “Everywhere is dangerous,” thinks Naomi’s father’s friend who’s been caught up in the action, “everywhere where human beings exist and multiply and continue to breathe.” It’s exciting for sure, but cuts closer to the bone than Osborne’s previous novels and is all the more distressing and depressing for it.

‘Beautiful Animals’ by Lawrence Osborne (Hogarth, £14.99)