Triangulation

John Hopkins, a retired English mapmaker, travels into his past in search of his former roommate, explorer Laurance Wallace, and the woman they both once loved, Helen Gardner, when a long undelivered letter finds its way back into his life.

In the same spirit if not in the same class as The Remains of the Day and The English Patient, British author Whitaker's second novel (but first to be published here) tells the story of a repressed mapmaker whose final effort to change the course of his existence prompts him to reflect on a decades-old romance, stirring up buried passions and old disappointments. On his last day before retirement from a 40-year position in the Ordnance Survey department of the English government in Southampton, John Hopkins gets an e-mail whose offhand mention of a small town drives him to seek out an old love there. Whitaker constructs the novel around the narrator's en route perusal of his earliest correspondence files, reproducing letters and news reports to help readers piece together the sad story. In the '50s, a love triangle is established between three surveyors: Hopkins; the spirited and unpredictable Laurance Wallace, on assignment in deepest Africa; and Helen Gardner, a smart young woman from the country who has just taken up a position in Hopkins's organization. The mild-mannered Hopkins desperately wants a stable relationship with Gardner, but his hopes dissolve when the more sexually experienced and worldly Wallace sweeps her off her feet. Wallace lures Gardner to Africa for a sudden and romantic marriage; however, past indiscretions surface to ultimately invalidate their union and tarnish his golden image. While Hopkins languishes in loneliness, Wallace pays the price for his love of risk in the wilds of a still-untamed continent. Whitaker's meticulous prose is shot through with a veneration for gallant heroism and even a touch of nostalgia for the questionable glories of imperialism. Though the narrator's extreme reserve threatens to squelch the passion and torment the author so carefully fosters, the narrative moves gracefully toward its tragic end. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Britisher Whitaker's second novel (but first to be published in the US) leans on the cartographic technique of triangulation to map human hearts in a love trio. In the mid-1950s, fresh from a hitch in the army, John Hopkins takes a job as librarian with the government's mapmaking service, Ordnance Survey. He is a cautious, fastidious, prudish, and lonely man whose ambition has always been simply to draw a salary for hiding out in a bureaucracy. Thus Whitaker sets himself the task of writing about a boring man in an interesting way, which he attempts by having John report on his, by contrast, rather dashing roommate, Laurance Wallace. Laurance heads off for Kenya just as the African colonies, British, French, and Belgian, are about to heave out their colonizers. Hes a surveyor for a kindred agency, the Directorate of Overseas Surveys, and both his fieldwork and Johns retrieval work become necessary in the deployment of troops and the drawing of boundaries. Both men fall in love with Helen, a coworker, but she concludes, rightly enough, that John is a boring if likable man and sets her course by Laurance's star. In a scene out of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Laurance dies in a jungle camp, leaving Helen five months pregnant and destitute. Years later, upon his retirement, John conducts a rather silly errand, to take a look at the geographic center of England, a village called Dunsop Bridge, as an excuse to look up Helen, whom he has never stopped loving. Helen retains some affection for him, but even 40 years after his death she still loves Laurance more. Whitaker's prose is elegant and precise, and his nostalgia for simpler times congenial, but the reader may agree with Helen that John, though awfully decent, is rather tiresome. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.