Mistaken
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £2.49
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- £2.49
Publisher Description
'I had been mistaken for him so many times that when I heard he had died it was as if part of myself had died too.'
Kevin Thunder grew up with a double - a boy so uncannily like him that they were mistaken for each other at every turn. As children in 1960s Dublin , one lived next to Bram Stoker's house, haunted by an imagined Dracula, the other in the more refined spaces of Palmerston Park. Though divided, like the city itself, by background and class, they shared the same smell, the same looks, and perhaps, as he comes to realize, the same soul. They exchange identities when it suits them, as their lives take them to England and America, and find that taking on another's personality can lead to darker places than either had imagined.
Neil Jordan's long-awaited new novel is an extraordinary achievement - a comedy of manners at the same time as a Gothic tragedy, a thriller and an elegy. It offers imaginative entertainment of the highest order.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A case of mistaken identity sets the plot in motion in this meticulous, well-crafted novel from author and filmmaker Jordan (Interview with the Vampire). Kevin is growing up in working class North Dublin when unexplainable things begin to happen: strange girls press their hips against his in the dance club asking him why he hasn t called and men offer him cigarettes, despite his never having smoked. Eventually, it becomes clear that Kevin is being mistaken for another, a boy named Gerry from the wealthier side of town, who attends a posh school. Initially frightened, Kevin begins little by little to take advantage of these bizarre circumstances. Having led a young woman who insists they know one another down to a grassy section of the dunes, he s momentarily stumped, then lets the imagined him the other take over. Kevin and Gerry meet as adolescents, and so begins a lifetime s worth of chance encounters, misunderstandings, and intermittent life-swapping, culminating in a shared crime, that, as Kevin says, Gerald wanted but he (Kevin) executed. As one might expect from a seasoned filmmaker, the novel is well plotted and mysteries are revealed at a tantalizing pace. Nor is Jordan a slouch on the sentence level; the language is precise and evocative, with Dublin itself lovingly rendered in all its gray complexity.
