Book review: The Ballad Of A Small Player

Formerly a travel writer - and a person apparently accustomed to excelling in pretty much every area he delves into - British novelist Lawrence Osbourne is something of a throwback to the classic 1930-50 literary period, a time when the likes of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene were in their prime, setting standards few could ever hope to attain, let alone emulate. 

Lawrence Osbourne

Vintage, €11.99

Osbourne shares with Waugh, in particular, a strain of stylised writing that is equal parts clever-clever, pretentious, and informed with a certain kind of wisdom.

Published last year in hardback, The Ballad Of A Small Player is Osbourne’s third novel (after his 1986 debut, Ania Malina, and 2012’s The Forgiven; his fourth, Hunters In The Dark, has just been published by Hogarth), and is set in Macau, a tiny peninsula in mainland China that is over 60km to the west of Hong Kong.

Often referred to as the ‘Las Vegas of Asia’, there’s a broiling underbelly to the place that perfectly suits the seediness of Osbourne’s narrator, a disgraced lawyer from Sussex, on the run after the embezzlement of substantial sums of money from a trusting elderly widow.

Lord Doyle is the affectatious name our narrator is given, and it bestows upon him a veneer of both ambiguity and affluence; the former is slowly stripped away through strategic use of back story, while the latter status becomes all too fragile.

Sitting at the tables of Macau’s fetid casinos, he plays baccarat ‘punto banco’, a high stakes game of pure risk that can make a player either very rich or very poor in the time it takes to flip over a card.

Despite displaying extreme indifference to his fate, Lord Doyle’s seemingly neverending supply of money finally gets busted by chance, and he – with his sole friend, casino prostitute Dao-Ming – takes off to a remote village to lick his wounds and to plan an eventual return to Macau-based casinos, games of punto banco, and millions of dollars.

Osbourne is a stylist — of that there little doubt. And yet there are times when he’s less Evelyn Waugh and more AA Gill.

“She fed me fine long bamboo clams,” he writes of a restorative meal with Dao-Ming, “and slipper lobsters coloured the pale pink and green of shells served on their backs under garlic crusts … We ate our selections with spring onions tossed in oil, and kale, with crunchy beans.”

Other times, Osbourne’s descriptive style is sleek and acutely observed: “They are dressed like the corporate officers of the future,” he remarks of female receptionists in Macau’s purposefully grandiose hotels.

“They are as quiet as machines, they glide and purr and rotate and murmur. They are frictionless but powerful, for inside their realms they are omnipotent, they are the soft arm of the law. Who can resist them?”

It is indeed difficult to resist writing like that (similar examples are to be discovered in each chapter) and so overall The Ballad Of A Small Player packs a tidy punch.

There is a sense of foreboding throughout that pitches Lord Doyle not only as a self-deluded member of an imagined aristocracy but also as a man floating between a reality he can barely admit to and a fantasy he can never attain.

Matters, needless to say, don’t go according to plan, but then that is what happens when you play life like a game of cards – eventually luck runs out, and, writes Osbourne, “it grows a little tired and then falls down from exhaustion.”