Tyler Sedgewick is a 40 something operative who half-heartedly works for a detective firm called “Cyclops Eye,” trailing errant spouses, occasionally landing an assignment overseas. He’s bored, and when, in a nod to Tom Ripley, he is asked by a wealthy American businessman, James Knight, to track down his wayward twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Chana, whom he thinks is in Turkey.
Chana’s late mother was a wealthy Turkish woman, and she has family in the region. Knight just wants Tyler to befriend her, get a sense of what she’s doing. He believes she is on some kind of left-wing jag, and he wants photos of her and any friends. Tyler is charged with getting them without letting on that Chana is under surveillance.
Tyler is picked for the job because he was a schoolmate at Groton of the current US consul there, David Meltzer. The two were not close in school, but Tyler leads Knight to believe otherwise. Meltzer is gay and comes from money, both unlike Tyler. “… [David] was not quite real, just as the Knights were not quite real. They emanated from the same aquarium, brilliant little fighting fish who could only be observed on the other side of the glass.”
He ends up ensconced in a nice hotel in Bodrum on the Aegean Sea (Chana’s credit card was used at the same hotel), and while he should be looking hard for Chana, Tyler starts to feel it: his days pass in cafes, beaches and coffee shops. “He never saw her, but he didn’t care … He was bound to reflect, eating ice creams and iles flottanjtes on another man’s dime, that there are worse ways to spend the hot months. He realized that it didn’t matter whether he found her or not. He had his reprieve from mounting bills and debts at home. Nor was it even a realistic mission….”
Eventually, in spite of his lackadaisical attitude, he spots a young woman who resembles Chana, with a man her age, on a beach by a luxe hotel. He introduces himself as a traveler and writer, and the ingratiation begins. Chana now calls herself Aylin. Her companion is Adam, and along with two others, a high-strung woman, Diana, and an Italian named Marco (whose day-to-day life consists of “living in London doing some finance stuff. This and that. Circling.”).
Tyler, after several drinks, brings up his acquaintance with Meltzer. This information piques the interest of the four, although Tyler is unclear why. “Young leftist free agents – or so it seemed – dressed in expensive clothes and hidden among their own class as they sat waiting in a foreign country. But for what were they waiting? They must have discussed some great plan that they would never reveal. Obviously, though, they hadn’t yet enacted it. Curious, opaque. It was therefore something firmly in their future. But in a moment anyway the mood changed.”
The mood may have changed, but that’s not the only thing: as Tyler spends more time around the four friends, he begins to fall for Chana. He tells her father he still is making little progress in his search.
So. Four deeply alienated Generation Zers. They have politics, radical ones – or so they believe, money, but what makes them so unnerving, so disaffected … is that they are so nihilistic. Is this truly a story that seeks to delve into the Gen Z milieu, the mindset of an alienated generation?
In an email interview, I asked Osborne about this notion.
The pervasive sense of being utterly marginalized, no real future on a dysfunctional planet – it’s not that we don’t already know about how out-of-kilter life is becoming, so a sense of amoral behavior becomes the only way to cope. When you were writing Children of Wolves, were you finding yourself feeling the same way as these four wayward souls?
“No, but then I am much older than them. And of course, I live in completely different part of the world – here in Asia, at least in the part in which I live, the neurosis and pessimism are not at all the same. It’s hard to explain this succinctly, but the cultural platform is just different.
“I think every older generation has always been fascinated by the generations behind them – especially as the cultural distance grows. Boomers, especially liberal ones, do not realize the degree to which they live mentally in a world that no longer exists.
“I do spend a lot of time watching and observing on Tik Tok and Instagram and whatnot, and I can see the sliding changes in the language, the body language, the assumptions. Our film company also employs Gen Z kids and I work with them – so I have a sense of how they see the world. It might be incomplete, but then they have no understanding of my world at all!”
In one revealing scene Tyler asks Adam (who runs an art scam selling paintings of questionable provenance) what his parents think of his rental home. ‘I don’t tell them everything,’ Adam says with a sudden coolness in his tone. ‘They wouldn’t understand me being here anyway. In fact, I never told them …We all have parents who have no interest in us.’ His eyes came alive and he seemed to be asking Tyler to agree. ‘We’re castaways. Even you. The real revolution begins when doing nothing but lying in parks and enjoying sunsets is more treasonous than anything else. Don’t you think?’
At this point in the story, I was reminded of a J.G. Ballard novella. I wondered if Osborne was familiar with it:
Have you read the J.G. Ballard novella called Running Wild? We know from the start that a group of privileged and seemingly well-taken care of children have murdered their parents en masse. The only reason the authorities can come up with is “What they were rebelling against was a despotism of kindness. They killed to free themselves from a tyranny of love and care.”
There has always been and always will be tension between generations – but have we hit a tipping point, I asked, where “it just doesn’t matter” is an ongoing approach to life with this current generation and that’s pretty much all she wrote? When Adam says “we all have parents who have no interest in us” – that’s the inverse of what Ballard was writing about – same generation but by the time they hit their 20s they flip that switch.
“Yes, that’s about right. Moreover, despite what I said earlier about Asia we see this also in China, where “lying down” youth culture is a silent rebellion against the nation’s work ethic and patriotism. To rebel is to…do nothing. Or else to pick up a gun.
“I am a Ballard fan and have been since adolescence – so yes indeed. Our world is certainly becoming more and more Ballardian by the hour. Outrageous premises now seem increasingly pedestrian. I often myself feel like a character in “High–Rise” stranded in a condo surrounded by unknown human beasts.”
Unsurprisingly, Chana, et al are planning something – we clearly expect it to be an act of violence, and the interest the four have in David Meltzer and his stature in Turkey is telling. They feel a sense of imprisonment; it’s almost as though violence has a different connotation to this demographic. At one point in the story, Diana muses: “Only a meaningfully violent act – an act straight out of their shared unconscious – could give meaning to their lives.”
One of the most startling aspects of Children of Wolves is its topicality. We read references to Luigi Mangioni, alleged shooter of a health care CEO, and even more extreme, the Zizians … here are graphic examples of the manifestation of the degree of alienation this crowd is experiencing.
I asked Osborne about this ultra-topical part of the story. How did he manage to include these downright gory allusions?
“Interestingly, I did so only when the first draft was long finished, as if I was afraid that real life might refute me! But it turned out to be exactly the opposite. Some readers of the early draft thought the whole premise was implausible, but I could feel in my bones that it certainly was plausible.
“When the Mangioni story came out I did feel kind of vindicated but it was fortuitous as far as news stories go. Then the Zizians came up and couldn’t believe how similar fact and fiction had become. But most of this stuff had flown entirely under the radar.”
One of my favorite novels by Lawrence Osborne is The Glass Kingdom. It’s a slow burn of a thriller that reaches a truly shattering and bizarre conclusion. I asked him to elaborate on how it came to fruition.
“Well, it came from precisely from the Ballardian anxiety mentioned above. I’d been living here for some years – the “Kingdom” is basically my condo building – and the atmosphere of the place had percolated through to my unconscious. The tropical jungle nearby, the solitary, spooked tenants, the upper-class neuroses, the occasional blackouts, the intense heat and monsoon winds, the racially mixed denizens who rarely know each other or even speak each other’s language. Four massive towers connected by internal walkways, from where you can peer into a hundred different oblivious lives. Like a Polanski nightmare.”
Your novels often show what happens – or can – when these American fish-out-waters end up in a foreign country where the culture, not to mention the language, is essentially impenetrable. Yet they make little, if any, adjustments to the world around them. Do you agree?
“I think they are no better or worse than any others. The Japanese here are completely sealed off from the surrounding culture – they never learn even three words of Thai. They have their own clubs, their own karaoke, their own restaurants, etc. Anglos are actually not like that, the reverse actually. But all humans are doomed in this regard. One cannot really escape the cultural prison, which is ultimately the language itself. So in a supposedly globalized world, this makes – for me – a very interesting weirdness, if not a tragic dilemma.”
And finally, are you writing your next book? Is peripatetic-ness your nature, or are you settled in where you are? I ask because it is a unique ability to visit different cultures and actually develop a genuine understanding of place and its people … you do it brilliantly. “My current book is about seventeenth century New England, believe it or not, a subject that has always fascinated me. It’s always good to do something totally different in any case. It’s a landscape that haunts me and where I spent a lot of my younger years when I was down and out. Assuming, that is, that I’m not down and out now…”
Peter Handel has been writing about crime fiction since the early 1990s. His reviews, interviews, and profiles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Portland Oregonian, Pages Magazine, Mystery Reader’s Journal, The Rap Sheet and CrimeReads. Join his Substack here.
