The Guard
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Isolation, terror, paranoia. Two guards in a luxury apartment block stick to their posts while the world collapses around them.
'A mix of psychological thriller and SF fable, this is a strange, wonderfully claustrophobic novel' John O'Connell, Guardian. (Guardian)
Harry and Michel are stationed in the basement of a luxury apartment block, guarding the 1%. Until all the residents leave - apart from a man on floor 29.
Harry and Michel stick to their posts. The world might be at war, plunged into nuclear winter or decimated by a disease; they may be the last inhabitants in the city. All they know is that if they are vigilant, 'the organisation' will reward them: promotion to an elite cadre of security officers remains their goal, and their days are punctuated by vivid dreams of everything they are missing.
But what if there were no-one left to guard? And if the promised third officer arrives, how will he fit into Michel and Harry's studied routine of boredom and paranoia?
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Guards Harry and Michel inhabit the basement garage of the luxury apartment building whose erstwhile residents they were hired to protect. Confined to the quarters supplied by their invisible employer, their work is their existence, even as they wonder why the tenants have fled. Terrin twists this absurdist nightmare with the arrival of a unnamed third guard, who is evasive about the outside and the reasons for his presence. As an increasingly unnerved Harry demands answers, Terrin uses a pesky fly, a faulty toilet, and mounting uncertainty about the nature of the guards' employer to create a claustrophobic world that recalls the works of Pinter and Kafka. Harry and Michel's ascent to the residential level to locate and protect the building's possibly mythical last tenant grows increasingly hallucinogenic, and is related through Michel's unreliable narration. Terrin unabashedly invokes existentialist philosophy, and his vivid portrayal of characters gripped by unresolved fears and faced with absurd situations makes his work nectar for reflective readers.
