Yet despite such weaknesses, the novel remains a masterly piece of storytelling - set down in durable if ordinary prose. Goddard's attempts to turn his hero's discovery of some disturbing truths into a larger metaphor about England's post-World War I loss of innocence feel unduly strained his orchestration of assorted murders often verges on the melodramatic, and his narrator has an annoying habit of making portentous allusions to the future that tend to undercut rather than build suspense (''If you had told me, my elusive quarry, what to expect from a quest after your past, I would never have embarked upon it,'' he tells his subject at the very start. Certainly it's easy enough to find fault with ''Past Caring'' - Mr. It also turns out, as the reader only gradually realizes, that Martin is himself a somewhat disreputable fellow whose modest self-portrait conceals dark secrets of his own.Ī nominee for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize last year, Robert Goddard's first novel combines the expert suspense-manipulation skills of a Daphne du Maurier romance with those of a John le Carre thriller. As it turns out, of course, he is both - a student of history whose biographical research leads him into a sordid tangle of death and betrayal. London, that grey month of March, seemed to echo my self-pity.''įor all the Chandleresque echoes of his speech, Martin Radford initially seems more like one of Simon Grey's bedraggled academics than a tough-guy private eye capable of unraveling a nasty series of murders. ''THE spring of 1977,'' says Robert Goddard's hero by way of introduction, ''found me, newly past thirty, a bad case of wasted talent in a largely waste city - an unemployed, divorced ex-schoolteacher of foundered promise and dismal prospect.

Past caring by robert goddard