Underground

Tobias Hill

Do you ever find yourself on a long slow, slightly boring book and when you look down at the end you're amazed to see it was only 248 pages long? After all, it felt like 600. So it is with Underground by Tobias Hill.

The warning signs were there. Established poet decides to write his first novel. Novel set on London's Underground (so plenty of scope for lyrical descriptive sentences featuring synonyms for damp, dark and derelict). Dreamy disjointed childhood flashbacks (very lyrical and potentially very tedious). Novel's title begins with "Under" and author's surname contains "ill". Haha, only joking DeLillo fans.

I'm not saying poets can't write novels, of course I'm not. It's just they do tend towards the rich, dreamy, lyrical sentence at every opportunity. That sounds like a good thing. It isn't in this case. Underground is supposed to be a thriller.

The story is of Casimir, a Polish immigrant and Tube worker in London. He thinks at the same speed as Hill writes. He is big, slow, ponderous, polite, but you wouldn't want to go for a drink with him. He has colleagues but no friends. His only possessions are an A-Z of London and a slim volume of Polish poetry (oh please!). He likes his job, which appears to be watching the monitors in the station master's office and moving the odd bit of cable. Chasing rats out of fuseboxes, that kind of thing. Learning this much about Casimir the Tube worker takes you up to page 100 and still nothing has happened. Oh, somebody has been pushed under a train, but skim half a page and you'd miss it.

Well, after the much needed blood transfusion of a murder the plot does pick up a bit and there are further murders. In a very half-hearted way and for motives which are far from clear except that otherwise there would be no novel Casimir starts to look for answers to the murder mystery. He investigates disused tunnels and derelict lift shafts and other parts of the Tube you and I would rather not encounter and it's supposed to be atmospheric and I suppose it is.

But overall it's rather a slow self-indulgent offering. Not really recommended unless perhaps you're actually reading it while on the Tube, in which case its meandering descriptive atmosphere and odd encounters with the creepier aspects of underground London would, I assume, have a certain appeal.