36. The Sun Chemist by Lionel Davidson

Phew, this was a tough one, set my recent furious reading pace way back.  It's deceptively long too.  I thought it was a slim paperback but I have recently realized that page width can make a huge difference in the apparent length of the book.  Two paperbacks of the same page count can be as much as twice the difference in physical width.  The Sun Chemist came in at a laborious 284 pages.  I think this will probably be my last Lionel Davidson book.

It's actually not a bad book, with a strong premise, cool locations, a good structure and as always excellent writing.  It's just not all that exciting.  Worse, Davidson has this cool style where he throws you into the situation and the head of the protagonist as if you have already been part of his life.  Context and background clues are therefore extremely subtle.  Maybe smarter readers than me get absorbed by this approach, but I find myself at a distance and not really knowing who any of the characters are.  As an example, the protagonist is an academic from a Russian background who seems to get laid fairly easily (has a long-running affair with a colleague's wife, hooks up regularily with his research assistants) but you never even get his age until he is referred to as "young" about halfway through the book.  I thought he was an old man.  He avoids any physical altercation and only at the very end do you learn he's not a good swimmer but nowhere does Davidson ever tell us what his body type is like, what shape he is in, etc.  You are supposed to infer it.

So I am already disconnected from the protagonist and all the many characters around him who are barely introduced and come and go.  Then from this batch of somewhat indistinguishable players, we are supposed to figure out which one could be a traitor.  I just really didn't care.

The plot is about the hero, Igor Druyanov who has been contracted to write a specific section on a giant biography on the life of Chaim Weizmann a chemist and founder of modern Israel.  I didn't know about Weizmann, so that element was informative.  Druyanov is a scholar of the 30s and is tasked to go deeply into those years of Weizmann's life, where he stumbles upon a potential chemical solution that Weizmann had found to producing cheap oil and food. The setup is neat and early on there are hints of menacing forces hovering around trying to prevent the discovery of this formula.  The problem is that the first 90% of the book and much of the "suspense" is just Druyanov trying to decode Weizmann's margin scribbles, hunting down old correspondence, seeking indirect colleagues.  It's well put together and clever but boring.

Finally, the climactic ending involves a lot of chasing with lots of complex geography, first in a house, then on a construction site, then in some ruins and finally in the water, all of which I was thoroughly confused by spacially so had no real care as to who was where.  There are also two very obviously telegraphed "twists" that further bummed me out.  Druyanov is carrying the formula in a case that he has obsessively and carefully protected and hidden for hours and then gets duped by a fat lady falling over his feet in the airport waiting room and puts the case down so it gets switched.  This is presented as a big shock, but it is so obvious when it happens. Likewise, a visiting Indian professor Patel is seen as the antagonist when any reader knows almost immediately that he is a red herring, but it goes on and on for pages of frustration.  I'm glad I am through with this one.