Books: in brief

2 The Silver River by Ben Richards (Review pounds 14.99). For his third novel, Ben Richards grapples with the complexities of a multi-racial, contemporary London where each nationality is invisible to the others. Nick Jordan is a freelance journalist entering his thirties with a sense that his career as a hack, his relationship with Caitlin, his scathing girlfriend, and his social life in the eye of the Cool Britannia storm is at the expense of something more worthwhile. Tired of It-girls, buzz words and "camera sluts", he longs to do "something audacious, a bold stroke".

Orlando Menoni is a Uraguayan emigre haunted by his past as a freedom fighter with the failed Tupamoros revolution of the early Seventies. From Mendoza through Santiago to Buenos Aires he ran from the violence that shook Latin America in that decade, taking brief solace in a doomed affair with the chestnut-haired Silvia. Now, 25 years later, he is a cleaner in the East End. He welcomes obscurity, saying "anyone searching for the art of invisibility has only to take up a mop and a bucket".

The two men are brought together when Nick follows up a lead connecting "Sublime", the Essex club where Orlando cleans, with a bouncer framed for murder. Each chapter brings either Nick's or Orlando's voice to the fore, which is initially jarring. But as the perspective switches between the calm, knowing Latin and the weary reporter a unique picture emerges of an environment caught from entirely different angles. It is as if Nick Hornby and Gabriel Garca Mrquez have been commissioned to describe the same city.

The plot is incidental. The search for the facts behind a clubland death only serves to unite Nick and Orlando and to underline the horrible truth that the casual brutality evident in the torture and murder of innocents in revolutionary Uraguay is present in the callous kicking to death of a teenager in an Essex alleyway.

Throughout Richard's book, rivers symbolise the continual struggle against this undercurrent of human nature. The Thames snakes its way through the regenerated acres of the docklands, unsure, like Nick, of its purpose. Orlando remembers the deep Argentinian waters of the Rio de la Plata, the "silver river" into which the disappeared, including his beloved Silvia, were tossed from helicopters by the security services. Yet he still believes that all rivers flow towards their liberty. Richards has illustrated that the life of a young man and the resolute dignity of an ageing office cleaner have a deeper significance than the military induced fear of the likes of Pinochet.

Christian House