Ordinary Thunderstorms

Ordinary Thunderstorms is a novel by William Boyd.

Plot Overview

In London for a university job interview, a young climatic scientist, Adam Kindred, has just been interviewed for a job and is dining in an Italian restaurant in Chelsea. He gets chatting to a stranger (a hospital doctor) in an Italian restaurant, who departs, leaving a folder behind and Adam decides to return it. On entering the man’s flat, he finds his dining companion lying on the floor with a knife in his throat, which Adam pulls out.

Within minutes, Adam’s life is changed for ever in a way that could happen to anybody. Chased by a psychopathic hitman and the police, he knows his only chance to restore his reputation lies in uncovering the murdered man's secret – and the only way in which he can do that lies in becoming a completely different person. Or a succession of them. So, he goes on the run and finds a place of safety in a small triangle of overgrown wasteland between the Embankment and Chelsea Bridge. For a few days, he lives rough, a wanted man with neither money, job, passport, or credit cards. He embarks on a Robinson Crusoe existence, taking extreme steps he takes to conceal himself and hunting the Thames’s waterbirds for food (he roasts a seagull for example). He keeps his valuables in a hole in the ground and he defends his territory with rudimentary weaponry.

As the book continues, the reader encounters a pharmaceutical company conducting unethical drug trials on children, an attractive young policewoman who lives on a houseboat with her dope-smoking father, suggestions of state involvement and a contract killer who spent 14 years in the SAS. Being a fugitive takes Adam Kindred into a very different kind of London – an underclass (updated from the riverine body-hunters Dickens would have known in Our Mutual Friend) to include drug-dealers, sink-estate gang leaders, prostitutes, rough-sleepers and immigrants struggling to get on the bottom rung of society's ladder, depicted almost satirically by Boyd. He joins a loony fringe church, the Church of John Christ, which is supported by City Hall’s Youth Outreach Programme. He also lives for a time with a black prostitute on a sink estate, where he meets her landlord, the menacing drug dealer “Mr Quality”, who is also chairman of the resident’s association.