Did you admire John Knowles's first novel, "A Separate Peace"? After floundering somewhat in his three subsequent novels ("Morning in Antibes," "Phineas" and "The Paragon"), Mr. Knowles seems to be in firm control again in "Spreading Fires." At least for a while, he does. A lot of tension builds on the surface of this story about a strange cook named Neville who comes with a villa in the South of France that Brendan Lucas has rented for the summer. As long as Brendan stays alone at the villa, Neville is merely compulsively neat and industrious; but when Brendan's sister and fiancé arrive, Neville starts venting rage and paranoia; and when Brendan's overdomineering mother arrives, Neville starts fondling his butcher knife and meat cleaver. Tension builds beneath the surface too, as Mr. Knowles skillfully mirrors in the Mediterranean landscape the smoldering homosexual fires that spread among the villa's occupants.
But midway through the novel something goes wrong. Superficially, Mr. Knowles plays his trump card too soon: Neville the cook goes berserk around page 100, and the last third of the plot is dissipated in the incredible mechanics of Neville's comings and goings between a local mental hospital and the villa. But beneath the surface, Mr. Knowles plays his hand too reluctantly: he never goes beyond signifying that Neville is Brendan's doppelgänger, acting out Brendan's unresolved Oedipal rage at his mother and approaching a commitment of homosexuality. Surface and subsurface seem out of phase with each other. The murderer stalks too soon to kill anyone, while the fire spreads too slowly to burn anything. We are left with the frustrated wish that Mr. Knowles had either stuck to writing a straight thriller about a cook who gradually goes insane or gone further in exploring the homosexual passions that burn beneath his abortive thriller.
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