The Chameleon, Sam Fisher, book review: pacy time-traveller shows off bookshop founder’s genre knowledge

Sam Fisher, bookseller turned author and weaver of ‘a captivatingly reflexive tale’

What common household item has the ability to confer eternal life? The book, of course.

Be it a love story, a thriller or a work of history, a written account makes those it depicts last forever. Revelling in its own wizardry, The Chameleon weaves a captivatingly reflexive tale around the life-giving possibilities of the printed word.

In the process this début novel by Sam Fisher, co-founder of Burley Fisher Books in Haggerston, takes a nod at virtually every literary genre from classic romance though to magical realist epic and spy story.

Fittingly for a bookseller, Fisher’s narrator is the an 800-year-old chameleon-like book who calls himself John and can change himself into any specific title at will.

Postmodernist conceits such as this were in the 1970s and 1980s associated with barely readable experimental novels that may have been intellectually edifying but were hardly page-turners.

Not so The Chameleon, whose lively plot zips along at a nice pace. The protagonists are a couple married in post-war England. Fresh out of university Roger meets Margery, signs up for a career in the Foreign Office and then his life becomes complicated. Only later does it become apparent that the choices he made in those early years were to have lasting consequences for generations to come.

At another level, The Chameleon is also the story of the book as a cultural artefact. Fisher practices a deft sampling technique, mixing in snippets of literary classics into his tale and reflecting on their relevance. The result is a compelling narrative and a subtle meditation on literary history.

The Chameleon by Samuel Fisher is published by Salt. ISBN: 978-1-78463-124-6; RRP: £9.99