The blue suit

The Blue Suit is a story about the absence of identity. Born in West Yorkshire, Richard Rayner had a peripatetic childhood, until, it seemed, he found some sense of place when he attended Cambridge University in the mid-1970s. But far from affording him security, Cambridge, combined with the study of philosophy and an obsession with books, was the setting for the start of a bizarre life of crime. Mounting debts propelled Rayner into a series of frightening, foolish, and hilarious adventures. Seventeen years later, trying to come to terms with his nefarious history, Rayner is forced to reconcile his relationships with his parents, especially his father, who himself resembles a John le Carre character. In so doing, he inspects with conflicting emotions - anger, sadness, embarrassment, humiliation, a dotty pride - his adolescence and the "after-images of a used-up past" that haunt him, and he touches truths that many of us would rather not acknowledge. Entertaining and furiously written with a sardonic air of grace, The Blue Suit is both tragic and comic, an inspired act of retrieval.